


Cry Havoc, and Let Slip Your Heart

by touchstoneaf



Series: Something Wicked [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Blood Sharing, Blood and Violence, Don't copy to another site, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Language, Gang Violence, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Past Rape/Non-con, Rape Aftermath, Rape Recovery, Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-01-23 12:23:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 24
Words: 188,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21320131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/touchstoneaf/pseuds/touchstoneaf
Summary: Part 1 of"Something Wicked"series(S4, between Something Blue and Hush)The Hellions have visited Sunnydale before.  Here and there, in twos and threes, looking for a good time.  Any hellmouth is a good time, after all.  Usually they don’t stay long, since the new Slayer started to get a reputation for making good times go bad.  No one wants to play when there’s a sheriff in town.  But then word gets around that a vamp with a reputation of his own has joined the Slayer’s camp.  That pisses off more than a few boys in the demon world; especially demons with a score to settle and a serious dislike of vamps in general, that one in particular.What’s interesting is… Once the score gets settled, the sheriff gets distracted dealing with the fallout.  And all of a sudden, the town’s wide open.Or is it?
Relationships: Spike/Buffy Summers, Xander Harris/Anya Jenkins
Series: Something Wicked [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1671157
Comments: 77
Kudos: 147





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OffYourBird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OffYourBird/gifts).

> I apologize in advance for this fic. It’s not my fault. My stupid muse dragged me, kicking and screaming, into this, completely against my better judgment.
> 
> I dreamed this tale after reading a bunch of angsty S4 Spuffy in this treasure-trove, and then watching “Bones” before bed. Apparently this was a bad plan, because my brain did a mashup. I swear it was never going to see the light of day in fic-form… but then there was a challenge, and… Well… I blame the challenge people for what this turned out to be. I take zero responsibility for the Halloween monsters that will rise forth from this very bad idea. But I am sorry. I really am. I’m apologizing to all of you, I’m apologizing to Spike (my only excuse for breaking my rule not to make characters suffer needlessly is that maybe it’ll circumvent some of his later, canon sufferings?), I’m apologizing to Sunnydale…
> 
> And someone should really apologize to my brain. Or spray it out with Lysol. I’m not sure which.
> 
> **Formatting Note:** For anyone who’s never read me before, I do a weird thing. Or, at least, it’s weird nowadays. I use an old fanfic convention from long ago because I'm ancient, and we didn't used to have access to italics in the days when I used to fic. Can't break the habit now, I'm just too old and it looks weird for me without it. Character thoughts look like this in my stories: /Blah blah blah./
> 
> **Disclaimer:** All characters property of Joss Whedon, damn his brilliant, confusing soul. And Mutant Enemy. And apparently some people at, I guess, Fox, now? (Who can even keep track anymore. I’m still half-stuck in the WB/CW/UPN confusion.) All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners, yadda and blah. (OCs if any are MINE, ALL MINE!) I am in no way associated with Joss, Mutant Enemy, UPN, Fox, or any other media franchise. I intend no infringement. I intend sexy shenanigans and JUSTICE FOR SPUFFY!
> 
> **Pairing(s):** Um, Spuffy. Always Spuffy. But first… deeply non-con Spike/other.
> 
> **Rating:** Oh, this one goes way beyond NC-17. This is Mature. This is hard and difficult and painful and triggery stuff, here. Flat-out warning; there’s a rape in this thing, and it ain’t a Seeing Red type “seduction-gone-wrong”. This is the real, as-intended-by-the-bastards dealio. I don’t linger over it or anything 'cause that's so not my jam, mostly focus on the aftermath, the ‘comfort’ portion of H/C, but everyone who reads should know what they’re getting into despite.
> 
> **Author’s Note:** OffYourBird, as always, gets every hug and cookie and snuggle in the universe for keeping me sane as I worked through a really difficult-to-write tale. Twinkles and KillerSnotMonster get all the kudos in the world for pulling a lovely, last-minute beta of a painful and uncomfortable project, because they are rockstars.

He was just…  _ so _ annoying. /Also evil, right? Don’t forget evil./ 

A weird microchip-thing didn’t change that. He’d… come up with some way to… be evil, still, right? 

Those  _ looks _ were evil. Those… lewd… suggestive…

It was evil that he made her feel… things. Had to be because  _ he _ was evil. 

/No. Wait. That doesn’t make any sense. Because then I’d be feeling them because I like…/ 

/No. It doesn’t have anything to do with me. He just has… evil charisma. He could make, like, a fence post at Shady Rest feel… things. It’s  _ so _ not my fault!/

Anyway, it didn’t matter, because she didn’t feel things, anyway. Except disgust. Nothing more. He was too… pale. And… hungry-looking (which was gross). For blood (which was grosser). Though technically that wasn’t his fault, but still. Officially gross, right? And, he dressed like a fashion-victim. Like, not as bad as some for sure. Definitely not as bad as that one uber-nasty vamp that one night who’d had the seriously bad Guns n Roses fixation and, maybe lice? /Can you have lice when you don’t have a pulse?/ But it still kind of rankled that all through their wedding-planning he had flat refused to agree to any changes to his wardrobe for…

/ _ No _ / Buffy chided herself angrily. /It  _ didn’t _ bother me, because that was all a stupid  _ spell. _ And anyway, why should I  _ care _ what he looks like, because he’s always gonna look gross no matter  _ what _ he wears; and why am I even still  _ thinking _ about…/

“Oi! Slayer! How ‘bout a little more from the mug, yeah? And make it a bit warmer, this time!”

Gritting her teeth, Buffy slammed the microwave door shut, and seriously considered making it really, really hot. And then maybe throwing it right over his stupid vamp face. Maybe it would scald him, with the bonus perk that she would get to watch him licking the drops off of his face as they ran down, and… 

/Also gross. But maybe worth it, and… Okay, why am I being so sadistic? Why does he make me…/

The microwave beeped. She slammed the door open so hard it almost broke off the hinges, and she dragged the mug out with a ferocious  _ clank _ . /I  _ hate _ him. I hate him for making me feel like a sadistic monster, and it’s not my  _ fault! _ He’s just so… disgusting, and _such_ a pig, and why does he get to order me around like this? Like I’m a servant or something? Just because we have him chained up doesn’t mean…/ 

Sure, okay, that technically meant the idiot vampire couldn’t go get anything for himself, and he was helpless and stuff, but didn’t he get that he should be nicer to them, and beg, and act like a prisoner, even a little? 

He was just so  _ bossy _ and  _ arrogant _ and… 

/You want him to be humble./

That made it even worse. But the problem was…

Buffy lowered her head to her crossed arms, next to the mug on the counter. /I  _ kissed _ him./

Even worse, deep inside…

/I liked it./

The traitorous thought had her straightening, dragging up the hard, brave, fuzzy screen of denial. /No, no, no,  _ back _ up! No one  _ liked _ anything. There was no  _ liking _ anything! It was the  _ spell! _ The  _ spell _ that made me like all the… the touching and the kissing and the…/ Seizing the mug, she slammed out of the damn kitchen into the hall and swung into the damn bathroom where the damn vampire was all chained up. /Why couldn’t Wil have given us all a nice forgetfulness spell along with her take-backsies, dammit?/ “Here.” She thrust the mug into Spike’s stupid, pale face, almost catching him in the eye with the straw. “And could you not slurp?” she demanded bitterly. “This is disgusting enough as it is.”

Of course, the jerk took her snappishness with equanimity and a leer. “Like that you’re a full-service Slayer. I mean, considering…”

“Spike, you’re a pig.”

He did that smirky thing as he reached out with those way-too-mobile lips, seeking the straw, and then of course shot her a depraved look from under dark lashes, because he was nasty. His red-rimmed eyes somehow looked all too lascivious in that pale skin, and dammit, she remembered him looking at her adoringly—adoringly!—and this was not fair! It was like a dream—a  _ bad _ dream!—but she still remembered it, and… 

“Wore that one out already, Slayer. Doesn’t change that you liked rolling around in the mud with me.”

“Oh, you’re so full of it,” she snapped. “You hated every second of it. Just as much as I did.”

Spike paused briefly, mouth hovering over the straw. Jerked his chains apart. “Didn’t hurt you, did I? Didn’t hurt anyone.” And his gaze, for a moment, was wiped clean of all gross intent. It was, actually, completely candid. “Can’t. So why the bloody hell am I back in this sodding tub, trussed up like a sucking pig…”

_ “Because _ you’re a pig. And a killer. And if you wanted to find a way to hurt us, you would. And because the only reason you didn’t before is because you were under a spell. And because…”

Was there something more candid than candid? Because his eyes were doing that, now. “You’re right, Slayer. Did I wanna hurt any one of you, I could. I’d hire someone to do it, out of Willy’s. Or I’d set a sodding fire while all you nits were in here having one of your cute little scooby meetings. Or some other idiot thing. But did I do that? At all? Even after the bloody spell was done with?”

“No!” Buffy exclaimed, horrified at the rundown of dastardly possibilities; most of which she had never thought of, because wow, he really  _ could _ actually get around the chip, couldn’t he? The Order of Taraka came immediately to mind, for one, and did not inspire confidence. “Because we jumped you and tied you up and…”

“No, you bloody well didn’t,” Spike answered stoically. “I let you take me in. I went quietly.” He turned his head away, sounding grimly bitter. “Course, if I knew I was going to end up back here in the tub like a bleedin’ hostage, I might’ve made a break for it. Thought I was movin’ on up, tied to that chair for a mo’, but then there I was, back again for the night…”

“Like Giles was gonna trust you tied to a chair while he slept…”

Spike groaned. Actually groaned, clearly frustrated beyond belief. “Look, Slayer.” And to her shock, he stared at her dead-on, without even his usual coating of sneering bravado. “Watcher won’t listen, but you know me in a way that sod never will…”

/Oh jeez, really? Because we’ve locked lips under a stupid spell?/ Riled up, she built up a head of steam to bust in and give him the biggest verbal wallop he’d ever experienced—and maybe she’d give him a good punch in the nose while she was at it. The  _ nerve _ of him!—but he plowed on before she could get a word in edgewise. 

“…You’ve fought me for years. You know… I fight fair. And you know I keep m’ word.”

Her eyes rose reluctantly to meet his, locked on. /Damn it. Damn you./ It was why she had let him into Giles’ apartment in the first damn place. Because he’d kept his word back during the Acathla thing. Because he’d waved that flag of truce during, and even after said truce was over. Hadn’t hurt her mother, even when she hadn’t been a part of the bargain and her home on Revello had been wide open, hadn’t…

Hadn’t done any of the things she had forgotten to include in the truce, even way past the time after which the truce had long-since expired. Granted, he’d gone after Willow, recently, which looked less good on him, but…  Well. There had been nothing in their unspoken truce about nibbling on her pals; part of the team, in the know, fair game, et cetera. She wanted to hate him for it. Did hate him, on principle, for it. But logically… he was a weird-as-hell vamp. Because he’d never touched Mom, the innocent bystander. And, just, dammit. There was a reason she always tried not to think too much about Spike. He confused her too much. He screwed up the easy, black-and-white rules.

“Any road, I’ve got nowhere else to go, yeah? Sod all else I can do! Can’t even feed m’self, so I’ve thrown m’self on your mercies; and how do you think that looks to the other demons in town? You think I actually could hire minions in this idiot place, now, to do me any dirty work? After livin’ here with Watcher-boy? Consortin’ with the soddin’ Slayer?”

Okay, Buffy hadn’t really thought of that.

“And as to the bit with the fire… Well.” He sat back in the tub, looking grumpy. “Dead dangerous, fires. Might as easily set myself ablaze.” His face twisted into a sort of caricature of itself. “Sod it, I’ve got nothing left, yeah? Fuck all left of what I was. Those bleedin’ soldier-boys wrecked me. Might be playin’ hard to get, but I’m stuck here. I hate all of you with every fiber of my bein’, and sure, I’d kill you all soon as look at you if I could find a way to do it…”

“Really building up my confidence, here, Spike,” Buffy informed him grimly.

“But I sodding can’t, ‘s the thing!” he half-shouted, frustration at his own impotence lending barbs to his voice. “Can’t do a bloody thing; can’t even raise a hand to any one of you without getting a migraine like to give me a nosebleed, send me reeling for hours. So you don’t need to keep me trussed up like this, like a rabid dog, yeah? It’s uncomfortable!”

Buffy tried for an exasperated eye-roll, if only to show that his comfort was of minimal concern to her. 

He glared, tried another tack. “And I know you don’t want to be sitting here tending to me, feeding me like a damn infant, any more than I want to be fed, or…”

Okay, he had a point there, and Buffy sighed heavily, sat back on her heels. Set aside the undrunk mug of cooling blood. She didn’t want to smell it anyway. “You haven’t earned the right to be unchained.”

“How the bloody fuck am I gonna earn it, sitting here like this, you mad chit? Can’t show you lot I’m toothless, lying about on my arse in the WC for days.” He actually batted his eyelashes at her. “Give me the chance to fuck up, Slayer. You can follow me around a bit, bash me over the head with something if I do wrong. Not like I can fight back…”

Buffy rubbed a hand over her face. “I don’t have time to babysit you, Spike. I have class.”

Eagerness lit the vamp’s voice now, like a hyperactive kid being told he could go outside to play. “Well, then let Watcher do it. He’s got sod all else going on. I’ll putter about and stay out of everyone’s way…”

Jeez. Just look at his face. It was obviously killing him to admit that he was basically impotent, dependent on their good graces. That someone as weak as a regular human with a few specialized skills could knock him out without much of a fight. 

Buffy found herself wondering briefly what it must have cost him to admit to it. But the fact of the matter was, he was admitting to it, which meant he really, really wanted to get out of here. /What’s he up to?/

But then, really, did he have to be up to anything? He was clearly dying to get out of here, and Buffy could scarcely blame him after all. It kind of hurt to see Spike, Mr. Always-In-Motion, stuck in one spot like that. /Heck; if it was me in there…/

/Okay, stop that, Buffy! Don’t identify with the vampire!/ Bad thinking of bad thoughts, and just no way should she be putting herself in the shoes of the evil undead serial killer. And also, this was  _ Spike _ . Of course he had to be up to something! He was  _ always _ up to something!

Spike turned his face abruptly away from her, teeth clenched. “Fine, then. Just… could I have the rest of the blood, anyway? It’s getting cold. And don’t spill it. I only get so much as it is, you lot half-starving me.” 

The return of the near-constant bitching would have grated, except Buffy heard the note underneath, now she was listening, saw the tight anger, the frustration, saw the red rim around his eyes concentrate, and… Dammit, yes. She’d seen things, during that damned spell, that she wished she could forget, but they had allowed her to get to know this man’s… /Not a man, Buffy! Vampire! Monster!/ This  _ monster’s _ expressions. 

Spike was damn near about to cry from frustration and disappointment… and something about that realization really, really bothered her. 

Spike was a monster, yes. An enemy. But the way he’d been lowered—to this, to begging for the chance to stand on his feet in front of her—it bothered her, alright? 

This was wrong. Fighting him was right. No-holds-barred. Vampire versus Slayer, to the death. Master vamp  _ mano a mano _ against the Slayer-who-lived. A real contest. 

But this? This whole thing?

It was unnatural. She didn’t like it. Didn’t like her old enemy-cum-reluctant-ally-cum-enemy  _ reduced _ like this. 

If she had to stake Spike, she wanted to do it for the right reasons, and she wanted him to be standing on his own two feet while she did it. 

She wanted him to have  _ earned _ it. “Alright; you know what? If we unchain you and you… plot to destroy us or… spike Giles’ tea with poison, or…”

His eyes had jerked back to hers at this unexpected speech. As she trailed off his lips twitched. “Thus living up to my name? Sorry, pet. Fresh out of poison.” He leaned back a little in the tub, almost relaxing. “'Sides, that’s not how I earned the moniker.” His expression turned deadly ironic. 

/Yeah. I know. Railroad spikes.  _ So _ much better./ Never hurt to remember that he was a deadly, nasty killer. “Fine. I’ll talk to Giles. But only because I don’t wanna be stuck feeding you anymore. Because it’s gross, and you’re not a bloodsucking baby.”

“Ta, luv.”

“Don’t call me that.” But her rejoinder exited without heat as she reached for the mug. 

“Don’t get excited, Slayer. Didn’t mean anythin’ by it.” He eyed her with interest as she shoved the straw back in his general direction. Fumbled for it with his all-too-mobile lips. Not that she was looking, or remembering how he used them, or… She wouldn’t watch him suck at the thing. Because it was gross. Definitely didn’t watch him push the straw away with his blood-stained tongue, because nasty, much? “Have my word. Won’t kill anyone here till I… Well. Have found a way to remove myself from beneath the roof, and am no longer a sodding guest. That work?”

“Not really, since I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you…”

“Oi! I keep my word, Slayer, and you know it! And any road, you can throw me pretty damned far, yeah?”

She sighed and shoved the mug back into his face. “Shut up and drink your stupid blood.”

***

Willy watched the two Hellions warily. It was never the best thing for business when those guys came into town. He’d actually kind of hoped that they would stay away for good. Or, you know, as long as there was a Slayer in town, which was sort of a variable thing, since Slayers tended to have a really short shelf life. But, you know, for better or worse, this one seemed to be hanging on for a while… which was bad for business in a lot of respects… but when it came to guys like these...

Well. Willy was a pragmatist. His business depended on two disparate clientele. Locals, regulars, he could count on to bring in a steady, nightly IV drip which fed the veins of his income. That was really his lifeline; the demons who, for whatever insane reason, made the Sunnydale Hellmouth their home… and really, who was he to judge? He was here too, right? Just as nuts as the rest of them.

And really, that was as much because of the other half of his clientele.

If he had merely wanted a good, steady business—that IV drip—without any fuss, he’d have dropped anchor in San Fran or San Diego. Decent-sized demon communities in both, without the politics of LA—couldn’t catch him near that shithole again, thank you very much, with those nutjob lawyers getting their fingers into everyone’s pies—but no. He’d come up here to the hellmouth for one reason and one reason alone.

Tourism. 

The hellmouth brought the big spenders. The locos who wanted to go on a big bender before they had to make their sacrifice to whatever Tuesday-night-special of a big kahuna demon was on the docket for that week, because it was the first full moon of the Age of Sarpathia since the last Cycle of Razmuth or whatever the fuck, and usually they didn’t really want to be here disrupting their lives to do it any more than the locals wanted them there doing it and raising hell that the Slayer might blame on them… but no one was gonna kill the kahuna for them and get them out of it, so it was buckle down and slaughter those babies, or get ripped limb from limb themselves. And, half the time, ceremonials like that were a death-sentence anyway, since the guys doing the rituals commonly ended up as first-line sacrifices themselves. Dudes who were grandfathered into those kinds of societies usually didn’t have a long shelf-life if their generation was up on the docket. Just luck of the draw, and probably they spent a lot of time cursing their great-greats for signing up to worship the mighty whoeverthefuck, but they were pretty much stuck with it by the time piper-paying season came around.

Hence, the drinking themselves into an insane stupor first. Which, you know, was usually good for business. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we’ll probably be dead; either because the ritual itself is pretty damn deadly, the guy we’re sacrificing to might eat us when he rises… or, you know, Slayer. 

From Willy’s perspective, the cash influx tended to be worth the incidental damage when a pissed-off local mad about the trouble they were bringing in and some belligerent, drunk-off-his-ass out-of-towner who didn’t even want to be there in the first place decided to throw down in the middle of his bar. Insurance to pay for damage after bar fights were kind of part of the deal. Willy’s adjuster was basically rolling in it right now, but meanwhile… Well. The whole thing eventually paid for itself and then some.

But… there were out-of-towners and there were out-of-towners. Hellions were in a class by themselves. Last time they’d showed their ugly mugs here in Sunnydale had been before the Slayer had laid claim to this little bit of turf. The outlaw bike gang, which had chapters, as far as Willy knew, all over the damned country, tended to avoid hellmouths if they had a current sheriff in town, as it were, since their brand of mayhem was rather less fun if it came down to a direct fight.

They were more of a ‘sow chaos, reap discord, move on’ kind of bunch, and only ever settled in for a while if they really liked the locale. After all, that sort of party tended to run out of steam quickly in ye standard burgh. It could last a lot longer in a hellmouth—Willy had heard they’d had a long-ass run up in Cleveland a while back before they’d been run out in some kind of turf-war with a bunch of Gavohks—but they weren’t going to risk the thing in a place like this.

A party like that tended to run counter to the general fun-loving ethos when you set up camp in a town with a strong Slayer-ish sort of presence. A reality for which Willy thanked his lucky stars. Not that he and the Slayer were on the best of terms or anything, but… There were out-of-towners… and there were out-of-towners. 

Though, actually, the presence of Mayor Richard Wilkins III had discouraged a lot of Hellions activity as well. Previous to Buffy’s tenure Willy recalled a brief incursion that had ended after only approximately three days; kind of a record for that bunch from what Willy had heard from his more knowledgeable and traveled clientele. More remarkably, they had barely gone from ‘raping’ to ‘pillaging’ before they had been unceremoniously shown the door during their last visit. They had never gotten to the ‘looting’ stage.

Say what you wanted about the Mayor; he’d brooked no nonsense or ‘hooliganism’ from the demonic element in his town. Locals… stayed pretty tame. Outsiders beware; stick to all posted rules. And, well… Wilkins had followed all protocols when it came to appeasing the higher-ups of the demon world; like clockwork, really. Babies, kittens, blood, virgins, whatever. Really very businesslike. 

The Slayer had kind of thrown a wrench in the gears, there. Not that Willy had necessarily wanted an ascended Old One in charge of the place, at least from a standpoint of possibly becoming a meal… but maybe it might not have been so bad? The guy had always been very organized. Who said he would have been any different as a huge snake?

Give Buffy credit, she tried. But she was just a kid, and she didn’t know half of the ins and outs of what she was trying to do; couldn’t seem to tell the difference between a local just walking home from the bar from an out-of-towner seriously looking for a fight. Sometimes Willy almost felt sorry for her. Almost, if she wasn’t spending so much time coming in to sock him in the snoot looking for answers, or busting up his place and scaring the clientele, or just generally being a nuisance, and pretending half the time that she was not really a part of the world she inhabited with all the rest of them; as much a part of it as Willy was. 

Well, he’d give her one thing. Most of the time she got it right, and left the ones to themselves who kept their noses clean. Most of the time. Sometimes she got it wrong. Poor kid was just stumbling around in the dark, though. Hell. She really needed some inside intel. Managing a town like this one was a pretty big job for one chick, even if she had a team; and all of  _ them _ were barely out of high school too, except the Watcher. Who you’d think would know better. Word was, he used to do a little summoning of his own back in the day.

Figures. Probably one of those stick-up-his-ass types who would rather die than admit he knew anything about this scene, so he just pointed the kid at everyone demonic and said, ‘Kill ‘em all! Good girl!’ so no one would find out how it really worked, and how he might’ve once fit into it. Willy had met the type before. For sure. 

He could’ve helped the kid. Could give her some information here and there; info more helpful than the stuff she occasionally asked about. Not that any of those stuck up little jerks would listen to anyone from his side of the tracks, if they had decent advice to give or not. Which kind of sucked the big one right now, considering that Willy had half a mind to send someone out to warn the feisty little chick about this current threat. New idiots in town to chant up some robed mucky-much of the week, sure. No skin off his. But Hellions? 

He was not a fan. “What can I do for you guys?” he asked tentatively as he slid two Jacks, neat and unbidden, across the bar toward them. He kept his fingers well clear of their clawed hands; knew better than to let any part of him get anywhere near those terrifying digits.

“You got good manners,” metal-face grated, and flicked terrifying eyes at him to pin him with a ferocious glare. “Excellent. Keep ‘em comin’.”

Oh, he would. And he wouldn’t keep a tab. Some things were worth breaking the bank over. Damn, he was sweating. Maybe he’d send someone for the Slayer after all…

“And you can tell us if we heard right that a particular vamp is in town,” the second one growled, his snarl stretching the tattooed side of his face grotesquely. 

“Uh… okay.” Willy fought to keep the tremble from his voice as he wiped his hands on his filthy bar rag. “Sure. Which vamp is that? Know a lot of vamps around here…”

Metal-face tossed back his shot and leaned in hard, claws clicking on the table. “Name of Spike.”

* * *


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, here's a bit of lightheartedness in the vein of the eps between which the tale is sandwiched, before we get into the dark underbelly of things... though, of course, we'll see said dark underbelly peeping through under the hilarity to remind us all is not fun and games. Le sigh.

“I don’t like it, Buffy. Most especially since I’ll be the one alone with him most of the time while you’re out taking lessons, and patrolling, and…”

“Think of it this way. At least he’s being up front about alternative ways he could kill us?”

Her reasoning earned her a weird look from Giles. “Buffy… Please don’t take this amiss, but… Do you perhaps think that your… interactions with Spike during the, ah, Will-Be-Done spell might have affected your judgment, just a little…”

/Alright, now I’m offended./ “Okay, seriously? Be real, Giles. How could that  _ possibly _ have affected me, aside from totally grossing me out?”

Giles sighed heavily and, pulling his glasses away, pinched his fingers over the bridge of his nose. “Please tell me why on earth I should agree to this?”

Buffy shook her head a little and struggled for wordage that would remotely approximate her feelings of complete disgust with the current arrangement. “Because it’s not right, Giles. Because if I have to stake him, I should do it clean. Because right now he’s… He’s not… It’s not…” She waved her hand toward the bathroom, unable to articulate her unease with the entire situation. “It’s just not right.”

Giles’ head rose, and he narrowed his strangely naked eyes at her, staring at her in something that might have been amazement. “Keeping the undead demon chained in the bathtub is offending your sense of fair play?” he translated finally.

Probably only his years of familiarity with ‘understanding Buffy’ had allowed him to get even that much from her word soup, but dammit… “Okay, yeah, it is. Also…” She grasped at straws for something more concrete; something Giles would, you know,  _ expect _ from her. “I don’t want him watching me pee when I’m here. I’m never gonna be able to use the toilet again in your house even if the curtain’s pulled around him, so seriously, Giles? Tell me you’re okay with doing that in front of him? Or that you don’t want your shower back someday…”

Giles frowned as he moved to replace his spectacles. “Well, as to the former, it’s a bit different with other blokes…”

She stared, blown away. “Are you  _ kidding _ me?”

Giles sighed, pulled the glasses away once more. Hung them from his fingers for a moment, looking briefly exhausted, though he didn’t polish them. “But I will admit that I would, in fact, prefer to be able to use the bath again someday.”

“Okay then.”

A little sigh, and the glasses headed back toward the naked face. “Buffy… We really should make some other, more secure arrangement…”

“What’s he gonna do, though, really? And in the meantime, getting him out of there is labor-saving. He can be all, self-feeding, and put himself to bed and stuff. You can make him a little ball of blankies in a sun-free corner. It’ll be like having a muzzled puppy…”

The glasses popped back on, decisively. Giles was, once more, super-Dad-guy, authority-figure extraordinaire. “Buffy, honestly…”

She couldn’t let him override her, or he’d win. Even worse, Buffy would  _ let _ him. “And he made a really good point. He can’t show us he’s capable of keeping his word again—which he already did once, which, by the way, saved your life, before—if we don’t give him the chance.” 

“He did what? When did…”

Giles’ gaping incredulity gave Buffy pause; briefly arrested her every thought. Somehow she had forgotten she had never told her Watcher about that part of the whole Acathla business. Had never told any of them. But what with sending Angel to hell, and leaving town, and all the craziness that had gone down in LA afterward, she had simply… spaced it. By this late date it just hadn’t seemed important, but she supposed… well, it kind of was, now. “When Angelus had you. During the whole Acathla thing, he came to me. Proposed a truce. We had a kind of… an alliance. We worked together to bring him down, get you out. He was the one made sure you  _ could _ get out, actually. If it hadn’t been for him, the world would’ve ended that night, since I definitely don’t think I could’ve done it all myself…”

Giles stared at her as if she had turned into some kind of organism he didn’t recognize. “Buffy, why on Earth didn’t you ever tell me this?”

Something flickered inside Buffy; something almost slightly rebellious. /Oh, ‘cause you guys gave me so much of a chance to talk about  _ any _ of it when I first got back! All everyone did was jump on me for being gone!/ 

Biting back the retort that threatened to slip her lips, she shook her head grimly, and the old, sick weariness descended once more. “A lot happened right around then. It kind of slipped my mind. By the time I saw all of you again it didn’t really seem... pertinent.” Not to mention that talking about truces with any vampires seemed kind of taboo after Angel… especially soulless ones. Even if they were temporary and had ended fairly well, considering, and…

Just, no. Bad plan all around.

Giles’ expression, though, had turned thoughtful. “It appears to have come ‘round again, now, however.” 

“I guess so.”

He nodded and looked away, apparently not super willing to entertain the thought that soulless vampires were anything less than cold-blooded, torturing killers. Not that Buffy could really blame him, considering everything he’d gone through when Angelus had had him. Heck, Buffy was pretty much right there with him. But… well. Spike was kind of an oddball vamp, with his whole bizarrely chatty self-restraint thing, and that mercurial sense of almost-honor, and… And… “Look; I’m not saying I’m the captain of the ‘I heart Spike’ fan club or something. Obviously I think he’s disgusting, but we’re stuck with him, so we’re gonna have to deal…”

Giles went back to the nose-pinching thing for a sec, then nodded heavily and replaced his glasses for like, the third time. “I suppose we must, after all, make the attempt. For lack of anything better.”

“Great. I’ll hang around for a little while, but then I need to get to Anth…”

“Capital,” Giles answered, a wealth of mockery in his voice, and turned toward the bathroom with the padlock keys sliding doubtfully through his fingers. “I am sure our guest will be on his best behavior until the very moment you leave.”

Buffy rolled her eyes as she followed. /Okay, sarcasm./ 

“It’s the bit afterward I’m concerned about.”

***

They tracked the vampire to his bolthole. He was taking refuge in there with the white-hats. Vamps could be perverse, but that was just completely disgusting. 

He needed to be taught a lesson. And he would be. Hellions didn’t forget.

So they waited; around the corner, silent… and watched. The regular comings and goings, and the not-so-regular. Got a feel for the place. The sheriff didn’t seem to be around much, which was interesting. Actually, the whole town seemed kind of… lacking a referee for the time being, which was sweet. Rumor had it once the bitch had done away with Big Daddy Mayor she had moved uptown, over to Goleta, only popped her head in a few times a week to do a sweep; clean up for old times’ sake. 

Kind of dumb of her to leave a power vacuum like that in a place like this; but you know. Why not take advantage of serendipity… or stupidity? 

***

Buffy checked back in with Giles that night, after class, a nice run-in with Riley Finn, and a bracing little patrol around campus. Only fair to go by, even though it was way out of her way these days. Like, two buses out of her way.

Spike was apparently behaving himself. Or, at least, ‘behaving’. As in, he was being rude, piggish, demanding, and generally a jerk, but he wasn’t openly trying to kill anyone. Also, he clearly planned to keep Giles up all night watching the TV that Giles, as far as Buffy was aware, hadn’t turned on in the entirety of the time she had known him. 

She wished them well working that one out, and headed back to UC Sunnydale to crash. Early class, et cetera. Called to check in again in the morning, before leaving the dorm… and was surprised and then chagrined when Spike, rather than Giles, answered the phone. ‘Rupert’s residence, home of the never been shagged, never will be shagged…’

_ ‘Get off the bloody phone, you git! I told you not to answer the thing! Of all the…’ _

“Spike?” Buffy demanded incredulously.

‘Oh, ‘s alright, Watcher. ‘S only the Slayer. Sure the chit knows you’ve never been shagged. Hangs about enough. Probably half the sodding reason, yeah?’

Buffy fought the unexpected tide of amusement-coupled-with irritation, managed to land more appropriately on the latter as she responded in what she thought were acceptably clipped tones. “Okay, you know what? Giles is right. Don’t answer the phone.”

There was a sort of muffled cursing, a scuffling noise, a high-pitched  _ ‘Oi!’ _ Something that sounded like,  _ ‘Gerrof, you twat!’ _ and then Buffy heard what sounded like retreating footsteps _ . ‘Don’t mind me. I’ll just find something on telly. Was only doin’ you a favor, anyway…’ _

‘Yeah, you do that, you berk… And don’t slope off! I catch you rifling through my cupboards again… Hullo, Buffy.’ Giles was panting as he took over the phone call. Wow.

_ ‘Not my fault you haven’t the slightest thing like a working taste bud!’ _ Spike called from somewhere off in the distance.  _ ‘You’d think, being human, you might like a little sodding flavor in your food…’ _

‘Sod off, you pillock, before I put you back in the loo!’

_ ‘Shakin’ in my boots, Watcher… Ought to go to the shops, you. We’re out of cumin.’ _

An exceptionally tried-sounding exhale echoed over the phone line. /Really, just, wow…/ “Everything, um, okay over there?”

‘Buffy, if we don’t get this unbelievably poor houseguest out of here before much longer, I shall very likely lose my mind and commit some act which, while not illegal in the strictest sense, as he’s already dead, would most certainly be in very poor taste…’

/Wow, he sounds majorly stressed…/ Buffy wasn’t sure she had ever heard Giles sound that breathless; not even when dealing with all of the scoobies at once, mid-apocalypse. And she had definitely never heard him use words like that; words she had only ever heard Spike use. 

They had almost sounded, for a sec there, like the same kind of British. It was scary. “Okay, just breathe, Giles. I’ll… um, come by after class and give you a break, okay?”

‘Please. Though, I cannot in good conscience guarantee his safety until then…’

/Eee./ “Just… Hang in there, okay? I know he can be a pain in the ass…”

‘Buffy. He’s filled my electric kettle with blood.’

Buffy closed her eyes. The electric kettle was sacred. It was made for tea and tea alone. Like, tea- _ water _ . Anything else was against all natural laws. “What’s wrong with, uh, the microwave?”

‘Apparently nothing would do save  _ blood _ tea.’ Giles was speaking through his teeth now. ‘One might think he was actually English enough to know how to treat a kettle, but…’

_ ‘Oh, don’t have apoplexy, Watcher. I’ve washed your sodding kettle. Any road, I made you tea after, yeah? And it was damned nice tea, too, wasn’t it? Better than you make it! And I made you scones, even!’ _

A strained Giles-whisper cut through the sharp Spike-grumbles. ‘Buffy…’

_ ‘They even had cranberries!’ _

“I’ll come over right after Psych class,” Buffy promised, and hung up quickly so she didn’t have to hear Giles losing it and staking a helpless, unarmed vamp.

More importantly, she really, really thought it wouldn’t help if Giles heard her dissolve into helpless giggles. And she shouldn’t be laughing about Spike driving someone else crazy. She really, really shouldn’t. But their tiffing was just so… weirdly British that it hit her funnybone somehow, and…

Willow came in then to find her giggling helplessly on her bed, face in her hands. “Uh, what’s up?” Wil asked, sounding somewhere halfway between relieved and unnerved to hear and see hysterical laughter from her bestie.

Buffy managed to get control of herself after a second, waved one hand. “Nothing. I mean, nothing major. It’s just… Giles… Spike…” She dissolved again. Did some deep breathing. “No. It’s just… They’re driving each other… nuts…” She could talk. She really could.

“And that’s… funny?”

“Oh, you know. No one’s died yet.” She lost it again. Because she so should not be laughing at that. It wasn’t a laughing matter. Except she had just gotten a mental picture of Giles, his face all demented, doing the_ ‘ree ree ree ree!’_ from a horror flick, but with a stake instead of a knife, holding Spike down by the throat while he staked him everywhere but the heart and shrieked, ‘You! Put! Blood! In! The! Electric! Kettle!’ a la ‘No more wire hangers!’, and, just…

She was lying back on the bed now, holding her belly, and okay… when had she last laughed like this? Really, she wasn’t sure when. Not for a very, very long time. 

“Buffy, are you alright?”

“Yeah,” she gasped finally, staring at the ceiling. The weird, paper-spatter stuff with its endless collection of dust stared back at her through a film of tears. Her stomach-muscles hurt. “God. Wil, I’m sure I’ve made a terrible mistake and Giles is gonna kill an unarmed vampire, but oh my God, you didn’t hear them. It was the most…  _ English _ thing…” She was  _ not _ going to start laughing again. But she did wheeze. A little. Ow.

When Wil answered, she sounded almost tentative. “Is Giles, you know… okay?”

Buffy sighed at that and forced herself back into a sitting position. “I mean, probably as okay as any of us are gonna be, having to deal with having klepto-the-bloody around, blaring the TV all night—I mean, it’s  _ Giles _ —and drinking blood out of the tea-thing…”

Willow winced.

“…And generally being a pig. But at least it means I don’t have to deal with feeding him anymore while he makes creepy, innuendo-y comments about ‘snogging’ me… and okay; what kind of word  _ is _ that, anyway…”

Willow looked away, blushing. Too late, Buffy remembered that her bestie was still being like the world’s most hyper-apologetic person on Earth after the whole ‘make Buffy think she was in love with Spike’ thing. Not that it wasn’t warranted, because ew. And it had really only been like a day and a half, so, you know, maybe Wil technically deserved a day or two more of groveling. But still; that hadn’t been a dig. “Um… well. I could, you know, see how it’s a relief for you,” she began tentatively, “but Giles is the one, you know, putting up with him…” She trailed off awkwardly when Buffy turned to face her.

/Damn./ “Okay. True. But… Giles had to baby-feed him too, before. I’m sure he didn’t like it any better than I did. You have no idea how gross that was. And also, tell me you were ever gonna pee in that house again with Spike in the bathtub there…”

“Okay, really no.”

“Also, Giles  _ said _ he wanted his shower back.”

“Still. We need to come up with some other solution.”

Buffy sighed heavily and gave her ponytail a tug. Willow, like Giles, was eminently logical about stuff like this. Neither of them were ‘fly by the seat of the pants, come up with a stopgap when it became necessary’ sort of peeps, the way Buffy was.

They planned ahead for disasters. 

Damn them. “Yeah. I guess so.”

Pushing herself to her feet, she grabbed up her books. “I can’t deal with this right now. I haven’t even had coffee yet. I’ll, um, think of something before I go there after class. I’ll see you in Psych?”

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll try to think of something too.”

Buffy flashed a grateful glance Wil’s way. Even if it was partially guilt talking, Willow would always be there for her either way. “Thanks, Wil.”

Heart lighter, she headed for class. /Everything’s gonna be fine./ 

After all… how much trouble could one neutered vampire get into, really?

***

They watched; and waited. At some point, he would emerge. If they saw him, they would get him away from his unnatural hidey-hole, run him over to their… ah… discrete, temporary clubhouse, have a little fun with him while they waited for the rest of the boys to drop on by, and then…

Oh. And then. 

That was when the real party would start.

No one crossed the Hellions. 

No one.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
(yeah, so... behind every hilarious odd couple is a dark cloud looming...)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, here's where things get dicey.

** Ch. 3:  **

The whole rhetorical question, ‘how much trouble could a neutered Spike actually get into?’ was quickly answered when Buffy stuck her head into Giles’ apartment that evening… and was immediately struck with the resounding lack of vamp-tinglies. Like, not one hair stood up on her neck. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. 

Clearly, this was a problem. “Giles,” she called into the room, “where is Spike?”

Giles’ head poked out around the corner from the kitchen. He had an apron on and was wearing one of those dish-scrubbing mitts. “Smoking. Outside, thank God.”

Buffy was flabbergasted. /Okay, what?/ “Why is he out  _ smoking?” _

Giles made a pained sort of face. “Because he nagged poor Xander into going out to get him a pack of cigarettes, after I wouldn’t leave to get them, since I didn’t want to come back and find my home a disaster of blood and Weetabix in some sort of tragic liquidiser accident…” And her Watcher disappeared again. She caught a brief glimpse of him through the bar window, and then he vanished somewhere in the vicinity of the fridge. Probably scrubbing spilt blood, and she didn’t blame him for wanting a minute or two sans-Spike, but it was just… 

Spike was a  _ vampire _ . He was a currently-mostly-harmless vampire, but he was still an incredibly dangerous vamp with  _ skills _ , a general hatred of every one of them, a personal vendetta against their little gang for having foiled his plans on more than one occasion. And sure, he’d given his word not to hurt them, for now… but the whole ‘while I’m under your roof’ thing was a hell of a loophole. What if he was out there plotting a way to get out from under their protection so he could turn around and kill them all via third-party, or… 

Buffy just had a bad feeling about the whole thing, was all. Call her paranoid, but this was  _ Spike _ , and she just really didn’t like the idea of having him too far out of range. “What even… Never mind. He’s outside, without anyone watching him. Seriously; how am I the only one who sees the wrong in this?”

“Buffy, he’s been out three times already today; and good riddance to bad rubbish, I say…”

_ “What?” _

“Came back each time. Don’t see what trouble he can get to. Watched him the first time. Most boring quarter-hour of my life to date, and I’ve wasted hours of my life I’ll never get back, listening to you lot talk about inane summer films and  _ shopping _ …”

Buffy ignored this mini-rant to stare at her Watcher, amazed. 

Giles looked nonplussed at her disillusioned expression. “Honestly, Buffy, he’s just outside the door.”

“Giles. If he was outside the door, would I be asking you where he was?”

All relaxation fled in the beginnings of alarm. “Oh, good Lord.”

Buffy promptly turned on her heel and headed back out into the gloom of Giles’ little atrium, biting down as she did so on the urge to chew her Watcher a new one. He was supposed to be the smart, old, intelligent…  _ adult _ one in all this! That he had trusted Spike _ —Spike!— _ enough to just let him stand around outside and smoke without even a chaperone, a  _ day _ in from testing out this new truce, was… It was just so irresponsible that it made her want to punch and kick and scream and lecture and… /Yeah, I trusted him enough not to chain him in the bathtub anymore, but this is  _ way _ outside the boundaries of  _ that _ arrangement!/ Heck; they should probably still be tying the idiot to a chair at night while Giles slept, and…

And she wasn’t being fair. /Spike is  _ my _ responsibility. He’s  _ always _ been my responsibility. I’m the Slayer, and also… He’s… He’s just so…  _ Spike _ . He’s always gonna come back and drive me nuts like some kind of bad penny, because I was dumb enough to make a deal with him once./ 

She’d had cause to regret that stupid armistice since, with the way it had somehow, apparently, forged some kind of irritating link with the dumb vampire that meant he was going to keep showing up in her life making stupid arrangements, or trying to knock her off all halfheartedly, like in their fight over the Gem of Amara; because okay… What was  _ with _ all those times he’d stood back and just let her recover when he could’ve finished her off, like they were in some kind of sparring match, with rules being counted by a referee? 

She had barely noticed during the fight, beyond a niggling irritation; a sort of underlying fear that he had, what? Not thought she was good enough to throw his all at her or something? She wasn’t sure, but now in retrospect that whole thing still really bothered her, because she no longer thought that explanation was sound, but failing that, there just simply wasn’t any reason for it. 

Or, okay.  _ This _ crap. Asking for her help during his incapacity, knowing she basically  _ had _ to say yes, dammit. Or, for God’s sake, refusing to stick to the vamp mold when it came to her mother, or… Or whatever idiot thing he was up to that week. 

/Spike is  _ my _ problem, not Giles’. I made him my problem when I threw in with him against Angelus, and this is like my penance for that or something. I shouldn’t have left him up to Giles, all alone, for so long./ 

She cast about her, feeling for the signature tinglies that meant vampire; more importantly, for the full-body ones that would signify  _ this _ vampire. Even at a distance she should catch him. The old ones were always powerful, left a sort of serious  _ flavor _ on her senses that carried over distance, impinged on her very being in a shiver-inducing way that felt…

She thought she caught a faint twinge of Spike-awareness down toward the corner opposite of the way she’d come. Headed down the steps toward the street, still twisted up in half-resentful, half-self-denigrating thought. /It’s just… I have  _ school _ . Sue me for wanting to kind of have some semblance of a life in my off-hours. Giles said he  _ wanted _ me to! I gave up Northwestern to stay here, go to good ol’ UC Sunnydale… and it’s not like I can keep a vampire in my dorm room!/ 

Once more, the impossibility of her life came crashing in, as it always did. /Buffy Summers; not-so-normal-girl. Try to do the normal thing, and the Slayer-thing jumps in to remind me how incredibly un-mixy it all is./

As she descended the steps toward the sidewalk, she felt like she was suddenly submerged in a vat of soda bubbles, the augmented feel of him crashing into her and setting her flesh alight. Turning her head unerringly, she caught a glimpse of bright, bleached hair in the spreading twilight. /There you are, you idiot./ He was off to her left, on the corner furthest from Giles’ apartment and smoking up a storm, a cloud of the stuff hovering all around him in the still, coolish air of early December. “Do we need to put you on a leash or something?” she snarked as she jogged down the last few steps toward him, and no, she wasn’t relieved to see him. Just glad she wasn’t going to have to spend half her night turning the town upside-down searching for the big, stupid, Doc-Martened, peroxided douchebag. Though, that would give her an excuse to beat him up, which was always fun.

Well, maybe she could hit him just for this. Sneaking off the premises to smoke counted as at least a misdemeanor, right? 

He answered her without turning, all witheringly. “Oh. It’s you. Do us a favor, luv, and bugger off? Unless of course the comment about the leash comes with more kissie-wissies…”

Okay, that definitely counted as incentive for a good pounding. She would punch him in the nose, and then she would drag his ass back into Giles’ apartment, tie him to a chair, and… “Spike, you’re  _ worse _ than a pig. And what the hell do you think you’re doing, anyway?”

Turning just a little, Spike threw her a look filled with extreme dislike as she hit the sidewalk. “‘F you must know, Slayer, had to get the bloody hell away from the world’s most boring Englishman.” He pulled in another drag, clearly utterly unconcerned with the status of his soon-to-be-caved-in nose. His voice dropped to something that was nearly a whisper. Probably something she wasn’t supposed to hear, but she heard it anyway. “Just wanted a soddin’ moment alone, away from all the pulses, alright?”

She halted and crossed her arms, rubbed the standing-up hairs as they overreacted to the pained lust in his voice. Her skin was practically crawling with awareness of his proximity. Everything about him made her edgy. Sheer revulsion. Unless she was hitting him, best to stay a few feet away. Otherwise… Well. She would  _ have _ to hit him. It was the only sane response to the constant strain of  _ powerfulmastervampire _ screaming in her veins and setting her skin alight. “God, you’re sick. You  _ are _ being fed, you know. Which is expensive, by the way, considering Giles isn’t exactly on retainer anymore...” /Jeez, Buffy; he can’t even bite anyone right now; chill! And all that big talk about fires, that evil look in his eye… Just smoke. He can’t even…/

“Oh, yeah, sure; like Babe-blood counts…” The derision was real. And the bitterness. “Cry me a river. Even the worst sodding sadists in any prison give a decent meal to their informants; the right viands, yeah? Somethin’ from a bleedin’ hospital, and not from livestock. Shite’s like livin’ on bread and water.” He turned away, shoulders tensing beneath in his dark t-shirt. Buffy tried not to stare at the way his lean muscles rippled under the thin, worn cotton, tried not to remember how his cool, sculpted body had felt under her…

/ _ Stop _ . You’re being  _ disgusting _ , Buffy. Disgusting! This is just… leftover… spell… stuff./

“D’you know what the reason was for bread an’ water?” Spike went on, grating his words out now, through clenched teeth, and Buffy focused desperately on his rant to keep from thinking about anything else. “It was to cause a gripin’ in the guts; add to the torture.” A half-smoked cigarette butt was cast violently away to the sidewalk, ground out beneath a heavy, ugly black boot. A new one was promptly lit with the silver Zippo, the lighter gleaming in the newly-engaged streetlamps. “Ought to have bloody well figured you lot just wanted to torture me. I can respect that, did I not have information for you, but if you wanted me to actually give it, you’d think you might start by treating me like a person and not a thing…”

“You’re not a…”

“Someone who actually had somethin’ of value,” he ground on, riding right over her protest. “Otherwise, don’t see as how I should be disposed to give you a soddin’ thing.”

Buffy fought to ignore the sneering rejoinder, the bitter notes woven without. /Wh… That doesn’t… We’re  _ helping _ you! You owe us the information because we’re  _ helping _ you!/ He didn’t even make any sense, and she hardened her voice against all of it, maintained her one hard line. “This isn’t a demon hotel, Spike. If you think we’re going to go out of our way to give you  _ human _ blood…”

The lighter snapped shut with a definitive click, hollow and sharp, and he shoved it back in his front jeans pocket with a fierce, jerky movement that made every corded muscle in his pale arm stand out in tense relief. “Fine. Sure. Whatever.  _ C’est la  _ bloody _ vie _ , yeah? Bugger off and let me smoke in peace, Slayer. Came out here for a reason, an’ it’s to get away from you lot. I’ll toddle back in like a good little toothless sod in a mo’, find something on telly…” The harsh note in the vampire’s low, rumbling voice made it sound like the words were being torn from his throat.

Buffy shivered involuntarily at the subsonics of that predatorial vibration. /You’re nothing to me. Nothing but information, and a problem on my plate./ All this crap that sounded like distress was the upset of a killer being denied his chance to go out and rip out people’s throats. That was all. He deserved everything he was given here. He was lucky he wasn’t still chained in the bathtub. The fact that he was free to come out here and… and  _ smoke _ , was… “If you think I’m leaving you alone down here to get into God knows what trouble, you’re out of your mind. You can smoke outside his door without…”

“Can still hear the sodding heartbeats in the courtyard, you merciless…”

The low, thrumming growl of an approaching motorcycle interrupted their intensifying face-off. Spike halted mid-harangue, his expression going oddly blank. His head turned toward the sound, and Buffy could swear she saw something that might even have been fear on his red-rimmed, pale gaze as he stared down the street. 

Accordingly, she followed his gaze, mouth open to demand just what was so damned worrisome about someone on a motorcycle. What she saw, though, quickly put paid to any questions. 

Two big bikes, dangling leather and accouterments, which okay. Probably the really big kind; whatchamacallums. Harleys. Lots of chrome and big gas tanks, like they could go miles. Huge front wheels, very tall. Dangerous, chugging machinery. ‘Death on wheels’, as Mom liked to call them, with a little twinkle in her eye that said she might have ridden on one or two once in a while during the misspent youth she had only ever hinted at but never fully outlined, because she didn’t want to ‘give Buffy any ideas’. 

Nothing like the bike she’d been on with Pike that one time, or that one she’d hitched on that one time when she’d been in LA after Angel… Well. Anyway, that wasn’t what stuck out about them, their size or loud rumbly-ness. What really struck the eye right off the bat were the bikers riding the things. 

As in, they were demons. Very obviously so. 

They weren’t in any way hiding it, for one thing. They had stretchy-looking faces, and big, pointy ears. One guy had what looked like metal bars screwed into one cheekbone, which, ouch much? The other one had a massive tattoo all over one whole side of his hide-like face. They had hardly any lips and lots of very pointy teeth, but not much hair behind a whole lot of skanky forehead, and they were wearing a ton of leather. 

“Ooookay; just great,” Buffy muttered, and sank into a fighting stance. “Of course, some rowdies just have to show up right when I don’t have any weapons on me but a stake…”

She glanced quickly over at Spike, expecting bravado and snark, maybe even some witty commentary about how at least ‘these blokes’ were free to party, unlike some people. Maybe some call to his fellow demons regarding his hope that they would ‘get her good’, or something to that effect. 

To her surprise, Spike actually looked paler than he had already. “Christ, Slayer, I can’t fight like this.”

/Oh. Not a fan of these guys, I guess./ “Jeez, Spike, there’s only two.”

She moved out ahead of him as the first bike thundered near, flashing in the low light. Swept out with a high kick designed to take the nearest biker in the knee. It was a move she thought pretty much foolproof in the taking-downage department… except the monster somehow kept its balance. Not only that, it flickered out to counter-kick in a practiced way as it passed, and to her surprise caught her ankle with its massive boot, nearly overbalancing her. /Oookay… so they’re used to fighting from a wheeled position, then. Good to know./ 

“This lot thinks it’s fun to wreck cars on the highway, pet,” Spike informed her tensely, swiveling behind her to watch the fight with fists clenched. “They know how to use the bloody bikes as weapons.” He was vibrating with the restrained wish to join in on the battle. She could feel his frustrated anger and fear from here, almost taste his vulnerability. And okay; in this particular instance, Buffy almost regretted that he was handicapped and couldn’t play along.

While she was still catching her balance from the mistimed joust with biker one, the second one was on her. As if to prove Spike’s point he drove straight for her, and she had to jump aside to avoid being run over by a massive, spinning wheel of death. In so doing she found herself a good three feet further out of line from Spike, almost in the street at this point, and practically a sitting duck for the first biker, who had come around by this point for a second pass. They had clearly worked together like this before. By the way they circled, sharklike, this kind of maneuver was obviously old news for them. Cut a victim out of a crowd, circle them, isolate…

Number two was circling in his turn, and dammit, she needed to get the hang of striking something that was not only a moving target, but had weight, speed, and height on her. Because, okay. They might not be as agile as she was, but they were faster than they looked, and a lot more maneuverable. /And let’s not forget that whole Einstein thing, because a donkey-kick with the mass and zoom of a motorcycle behind it? Hurts!/

“Fuck!” Spike bellowed, and she whirled, a strange, hollow terror fluttering in her belly. Dodged biker one with another shitty counter-kick—how was anyone on the ground and without a weapon supposed to fight someone mounted and charging on a  _ motorcycle?— _ turned around, and… _ _

Spike was being slung across the second biker’s gas tank like a sack of flour, a clawed hand holding him down by the neck while he flailed helplessly, incapable of fighting back. Biker one made to kick her again as she ran after them, because shit, shit, shit, what did they want with Spike, what…

They were already halfway down the road, and there weren’t even any rocks around to throw at the spokes of the wheels, and if they got away with Spike, who knew what kind of information they might get out of him about the white hats? He had been with them for days, he could tell demons like these  _ anything! _

Hell, that was probably why they had wanted him. He’d been out here smoking off and on for hours. They’d probably seen him earlier, watched him go in, recognized the house as the Slayer’s Watcher’s digs, decided to nab him, and just hovered here till he came out again. Heck, that might even have been why he was out here. Waiting for the pick-up, maybe? After all, a vamp in the Slayer’s camp would be a serious catch. He had the intel, the 411. Even if he hadn’t planned it he could even have signaled them, set up a rescue, when he first saw them, or…

No. She hadn’t imagined that anxious look in his eyes when he’d seen them coming.

Well, either way, her duty was clear. She had no time to warn anyone, gather the troops. She couldn’t let the bastards get out of her sight with their vamp baggage.

Buffy broke into a run after the departing motorcycles.

* * *

Yeah. So, um... it's all fun and games till it's not anymore. I always thought the Hellions could very easily be big bads. Just putting it out there.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so... *deep breath*  
This is the painful one. The "had to be fairly drunk to write it" one.   
I am very, very sorry, Spike, and I really do love you. I swear to god. I didn't mean to have bad dreams that ended up on paper.
> 
> Sorry, everyone.  
suffice it to say, this is the main chapter the **Content Warnings** were about.
> 
> (Speaking of which, major kudos to my betas for their help getting through this one!!! Very hard work helping me tightening up a chapter I didn't even want to write, much less read through again.)

It was easier than she'd thought it would be to follow the motorcycles. She had been sure they would lose her immediately, since, you know, girl on foot and dudes on bikes, but apparently when you had a guy hanging head-down over one side of the thing and kicking his legs all crazy trying to get away, it was harder to accelerate to a hundred or whatever. Not that Buffy thought these guys were particularly hung up on Spike’s comfort-level or anything, or really worried about dropping him on his head per se… but maybe riding with a person dangling that way made it harder to keep your balance or something? 

Spike didn’t look like he was trying all that hard to stay on, from what she could see as she ran doggedly after her quarry. The bike he was on wobbled precariously at first as he kicked and struggled, and he almost went down headfirst about three times… that was until the demon holding him down pushed his face right down onto the hot chrome beneath the gas tank—she could see his cheek smoking from here, heard him shriek—and then punched him hard in the small of the back with what looked like metal-clawed hands. 

He went still after that and stopped struggling. He just... dangled.

Even without the reduced distraction, they didn’t speed up a ton or anything. Maybe they didn’t think they needed to. They were going at a decent clip. Probably twenty, twenty-five, so it was a good thing they were mostly heading straight north, or she would have lost them. Thing was, they must not have noticed at all that they had a Slayer on their tails. Too busy congratulating themselves on having nabbed their vampire prey; that or too hung up on keeping Spike subdued or something, because they didn’t pay her any mind. Idiots. Bad demons, with a bad predator-sense. If they were vamps they’d have felt her coming. 

Buffy had always kind of wondered why she felt vamps and they felt her, but the rest? Some demons seemed to have, well… varying abilities to note the presence of a top predator, and from her end… Maybe sometimes, if she honed her skills and meditated and worked hard, a tingle in the short-hairs; but nothing like the same kind of inborn alarm. And definitely, for the record, nowhere near the same feeling of wild, insane, gleeful life and vivid insanity as she felt when fighting a vamp; that roaring awareness that  _ this _ was what she was made for, this was  _ why _ she was here, that vamps were…

Well. /There’s a reason we can’t get along, right? No matter what? We’re born enemies. We’re opposites sides of a coin. We’re… Whatever other thing is two-side-y and oppose-y./

She was lucky, it seemed, that these biker-guys were one of those kinds of demon that didn’t seem to come with a bonus Slayer-sensing antenna. Also, though she was still close enough to have them in sight, the idiots had pulled far enough ahead with their still-insensate captive that they didn’t appear to notice her at all as they swung around the corner. 

The left-hand turn they took would eventually lead them to the freeway, though, and a thrill of dread bottomed out in her belly. No way she was going to be able to keep up if they took Spike onto the 101. Not for the first time, Buffy kind of wished she was a better driver. /I can’t chase people on buses, dangit!/ It was bad enough that she had to take public transportation back and forth from school to do her patrols. 

Running hard in hopes she would see the stupid biker-reject demons when she rounded the bend, she pelted around the last building onto Stultz Boulevard… and saw nothing. No bikers. Heard nothing. No thrumming or growling engine noises echoing off the buildings.

/Crap./ 

She had lost them. 

Jogging along at a loss, Buffy felt strangely empty-bellied and even weirdly afraid. /C’mon, Buffy/ she tried to cheer herself up briskly. /Spike can take care of himself, right? He’s a hundred-something-year-old vampire. Who even knows; and these are demons. They’re, like, his  _ kind _ ./ And she was totally consoling herself out of feeling like a failure, but dammit, was it really? /Maybe this is some kind of, you know, weird, demon-y hazing or something, or he paid ‘em off to get him out of our clutches, or…/ Anything was possible, right? After all, he’d probably wanted to get out of their custody. /If anyone should be afraid, it’s me and my friends. I bet those jerks are probably getting info from Spike right now that’ll screw us up somehow; or he’ll send ‘em after us, or…/ 

/I should leave. I should head back to Giles’ place right now, warn the troops…/

Except, she couldn’t stop seeing that flash of terror in Spike’s red-rimmed gaze. That one, unguarded instant bothered her. It really did, because really; who were these guys, who could freak out a master vamp like him?

Unless the reason he was freaked was… /Dammit, get real, Buffy. Spike so can’t take care of himself. Not right now, or we wouldn’t’ve all been messing with him the way we were for shits and giggles this last week. He’d never put up with it./ The formerly badass vamp couldn’t defend himself against a fly right now and she knew it. /He’s even worse off than I was during my Cruciamentum.../ 

Her mind jerked abruptly away from that point of similarity, of empathy. No way should she, _ the Slayer, _ be relating herself to Spike that deeply. This wasn’t the same at  _ all. _ For all she knew, this was some kind of bizarre demon-world retaliation thing and he  _ deserved _ whatever they were doing to him, or… /He deserves a lot, right? For the things he’s done?/

A strange nausea hit her full in the belly. The ambivalent shakiness of her own thoughts frightened her, brought her up short in the middle of the empty sidewalk when she remembered the hard punch to the helpless, exposed, dangling body, and the way the biker-demon shoved Spike’s face viciously down to sizzle on the hot metal of the motorcycle. /It doesn’t matter what he did to piss ‘em off, Buffy. God, even when Giles drugged you, you could at least fight back in some way. You didn’t get migraines from even  _ throwing _ something at someone!/ It was all too easy to remember that terrifying trial, the swooping helplessness, the intense, existential dread of vulnerability. It hadn’t been all that long ago, after all, that she had been in the same place that Spike was in now.

/God. No wonder he looked so freaked. If these assholes do wanna do worse to him, there’s not a damn thing he can do about it! He’ll just have to sit and  _ take _ it, the way he has to when we tie him up and play ‘tease the evil vamp’./ Her mind quailed from the very thought, and a wash of shame flooded her brain, now, for the pettiness of it. 

She found herself pacing again, as if to outrun her frustrated whirl of thoughts. 

None of this made any sense. /Why would they  _ need _ to hurt him, though? He’ll just tell them whatever they want him to tell them, right? And then…/

Her feet were still moving, though, and they were moving not back around and south toward Giles’ apartment, but in the direction in which Spike had last been seen. /Damn you, you stupid vampire!/

She would just try. Try to feel for him, or for demon-y presence for a second or two, and then… /I mean, if they got on the freeway, there’s nothing I can do, right?/

Though, if that was the way they were headed, she should have seen them when she came around the corner. The freeway entrance was way up there on Maple, like, five blocks away. She should have at least gotten a glimpse of them going up the ramp, or…

Panting a little, Buffy halted to cast her eye around her. Where could they have gone to ground, if they hadn’t headed for the 101? /Except for the bus station up there, all there really is around here is…/

She turned, her eyes falling as if by accident on the Sunnydale Arms Motel Apartments, once home of another Slayer, among other people. Not the best accommodation in town, for sure, and it had seen its share of skeezy-ass demons, no doubt. She knew for a fact that the assholes who ran the place were excellent at looking the other way when even the weirdest looking patrons passed them enough money. She had caught more than one vamp dragging a meal in there, not to mention there was that time a nasty ritual had gone down in one of the rooms—someone hadn’t gotten their deposit back for that one, what with the fire damage—and, just… /Would they have taken him there?/

At a loss for anything else to try, Buffy followed her instincts, trotted over toward the motel entrance. Jogged under the slightly-sagging carport-thing that housed the check-in office. Closed her eyes, feeling for that specific vamp-vibe that said  _ ‘Spike’. _

She didn’t like to admit it, but he did feel specific and different to her than other vamps. She could tell him apart from the rest, just as she could with Angel. /Which has nothing whatsoever to do with the whole ‘made out with him under a spell’ thing, dammit. It’s because he’s old and all master-vamp-y! That’s  _ all! _ /

Her eyes popped open with a shiver. She thought she'd caught something. Panned the parking lot. And saw them. The back wheels of two Harleys, peeping out just behind the chrome bumper of a huge, ancient, saffron Plymouth that had seen better days, over there across the lot. Cast her eyes up, scanning the second level of the building. The vamp-vibe had come, she thought, from up there.

Swinging around the edge of the reservations-room, Buffy hit the internal stairwell, palm scraping on the aging stucco and paint as she took the echoing concrete-and-rebar stair two steps at a time. With each stride the vamp-vibe strengthened.

As she hit the landing and started her approach on cat-feet, Buffy yanked out her ever-present stake. It might not be much against whatever those bastards were, but it was something, right? /Heck, at least they’ll be off their motorcycles. Fair fight, you jerks./

She knew which room it was for sure. Easy to tell, with her senses wide-open. Spike’s presence slammed into her as she passed the curtained window. She could hear sounds from within. Thumps, muffled noises that sounded like someone being hurt; someone either gagged or trying not to cry out, and were they beating him up in there? Oh, wow.

Bracing herself, Buffy squared up to the door, stake in hand. Lifted her leg… and kicked it down.

She was prepared to witness a lot of things when the portal slammed open. Spike tied to a chair, being pummeled, maybe, while he smirked up at his captors and told them to go to hell. Something like that. But what she saw instead…

It actually made her freeze for a second in absolute horror. 

She couldn’t honestly process what she was seeing for a second. And when she did, it made everything inside her mind collapse into strange fragments. Images. Sounds. An insane, chiaroscuro of sensory input, flooding in on a cascade that didn’t make one single damn bit of sense. 

Buffy had been on a school field trip once, to the MOCA in LA in junior high. The main exhibit had featured a bunch of weird art where people’s faces had been broken into sections and cubes, and where humans were part-violin, or had their eyes and noses in totally wrong sections of their bodies; and everyone was screaming soundlessly in some kind of existential anguish unspoken. 

Right now she felt like she had somehow opened the door into one of those paintings. Had accidentally stepped inside, was now caught on the very edge of it like an insect caught on flypaper. ‘Girl caught in paint’, while horrible faces shifted, features blurring and doing insane things, tangoing past her ability to capture reality, bodies contorted into shapes and relationships that made zero logical sense. And there was no sound, for a moment. Just white hair, and…

_ Blink _ .

Spike was the wrong color. He wasn’t pale, right now. His face was almost plum with strain. His eyes were red and amber, open mouth bloodied, screaming soundlessly. A galvanic body bent double, clothed still, from the waist up, but… not from the waist down. Jeans around ankles, and…

_ Blink _ . 

And then the radio kicked back on. And god, she wished it hadn’t, as the low, terrible, pained sounds of impact struck her ears; stopped suddenly as one hideous demon, the one doing the… Halted, turned a little to stare at her. And grinned, widely, in that horrible, too-stretched-out face. And shoved metal-clawed hands hard, to push a black-t-shirt-clad torso down deeper onto the… The bed, and…

_ Blink _ .

The other one, the one who was standing there grinning, was turning away, was starting toward her, and somewhere out of the deafness, Buffy though she heard something that sounded like “Get the fuck out of here, Slayer!”

It was like a radio was being tuned back in. And then instinct took over; or  _ something _ did. Something primal. And she was fighting. 

But it was weird. Everything was in a haze. No thought. No… real awareness, even. It was like something had taken over her body; something sinuous and made of balletic slayer-ness beyond what she had ever experienced; something beyond the ability to analyze, something created for supple, graceful death. Buffy realized blankly that some… domesticated part of herself, the part of her she lived in every day, was floating above herself somewhere, watching clinically while this lithe death-machine that was her body very efficiently took this demon biker apart as if he were something made of filthy, leather-clad Legos. 

Buffy was aware, on some level, that she was on overload, was acting out of instinct, without a single thought, but that was fine. She didn’t really want to think right now anyway; about any of it. Definitely not about what she was seeing. Better to just act. To do. 

She dismantled the thing. She demolished half the room to do it, heard startled, distant exclamations echoing through the walls from other denizens of the motel, ignored them as unimportant byplay as she destroyed the creature who had damaged…

It was in pieces on the nasty carpet, soaking black blood into the floor as the other… disengaged from Spike to come for her. She disabled that one as easily, held it, struggling, its leather pants still halfway down, felt it writhing against her while she held it in a half-nelson against her chest, disgust the greater part of what passed for thoughts. Kept the stake to its throat while she disarmed it of its gross, huge, serrated bowie knife… 

“Fuck you, Slayer…”

Buffy ignored the thing’s spitting denunciations. Held the bastard’s own weapon out to Spike, who was rising now, had his jeans up, was staring at her with golden, illegible eyes set deep in a vampire’s feral features. He would need to…

It was his kill.

She was pretty sure it wouldn’t matter to him how much it would hurt his head. He would need to do this.

The brow ridges furrowed for only a second as he weighed the coming agony against the need for vengeance… and then Spike pounced. It was not the elegant move she was used to seeing from him. He was wounded, damaged. But it was a decisive move. He would take the trade. 

He did not plunge the knife into throat, though, or heart, and she should have expected it. 

The sneering demon in her arms screamed high and shrill as Spike carved his genitals roughly off his body with the saw-like, serrated blade. And both Slayer and vampire started when Spike’s reaction was…

Nothing. 

His chip did not fire. 

Buffy was so stunned that her arm loosened. And the haze in her mind faded, very abruptly, into horrible, jagged focus. 

The demon folded up out of her grip, coughing and spitting. 

Spike did not wait. Driven beyond all tolerance, he had no time for wonder. He leaped, snarling, and drove the knife into the bent body. Once. Twice. Four, five, ten…

Buffy finally had to stop him. He was going to hurt himself. He was… 

He was not okay. She reached out. Touched his shoulder lightly, aware that she might just get stabbed too. He was probably really not happy that she, of all people, was witness to what had happened to him, but… she was. They were stuck with it. “Spike… He’s dead. It’s done.”

Spike flung her hand off. Backed away from the nasty corpse, breathing hard and, probably for him right now, way too necessarily. Didn’t look at her as he flung the knife away, black blood spattered all the way up one pale arm and gleaming wetly across his black tee, and… “Go away, Slayer.” It came out bitterly, words chewed out with sharp, precise rage, and dammit, she got it, but he was really not okay right now, and how the hell did he think she could just… leave? After this? 

“No.” 

His eyes jerked up to hers. “They’re dead, alright? Can’t tell ‘em anything. Didn’t. Even if I did, they’re dead. Your little Scooby group is safe, yeah? So fuck off back to the Watcher, toddle on home…”

He knew. Knew what she’d thought, why she’d come, and still…

Something tightened in her chest, and somehow only one syllable seemed to be able to exit her mouth. She had no idea what was going on anymore, but… “No.”

His eyes closed; red-rimmed and painful, and his mouth was all bloody; scored, like he’d bitten his lips. And she was just now realizing he was still in game-face, and probably it was helping him with… With the pain, and how had she not even noticed that? Normally when a vamp was all vampy she got antsy, but right now she just hadn’t even noticed at all. She for sure didn’t even care. 

She definitely got it. /God. I wanted him humiliated… but not like  _ this _ . Not…/ “At… at least you could…” She would not think about what it meant, right now, that the chip those commandos had put in his head seemed not to be working anymore. That was the least of their worries at the moment. Spike was so not in the headspace to hurt anyone human. 

/Well, maybe me, but I can handle myself if he decides to take it out on me. I bet right now he’s so mad at other demons that…/

The glare that met her eyes in that moment nearly made her quail. It did make her take an automatic step back, the fury in there was so unutterably palpable. Except… she was torn, because the agony in the rest of his face… “That makes it fucking worse, goddammit! I could’ve…” He turned away, back to her, and…

“Oh.” /Oh God./ 

He could have fought back. And he hadn’t known it. So he didn’t, and… 

/Oh God./ 

She was wrong. He was mad at himself. 

“Why’d you have to come here, you bitch?” he whispered to the wall opposite them; a pained, rigid thing. 

He wasn’t really hating her right now. He was hating himself, hating everything. /Oh, man…/ 

She couldn’t hold it against him. Anything he said. Not right now. He was… He’d been through…

She wouldn’t hold  _ anything _ against him. Nothing. If it was  _ her _ …

She definitely wouldn’t want anyone, especially an enemy, to walk in on her when she was… When… “Why don’t… Why don’t you go get… cleaned up,” she stumbled, “and I’ll… I’ll take care of this, okay?” She waved her hand at the dismembered, nasty bodies. He shouldn’t see them when he got back out, though god knew what she’d do with them in the interim, because she was for sure not going to leave him alone. “And I’ll… I’ll wait out here. So no one else’ll come.”

He swung around. Just stared for a second, and his eyes were so incredibly red around the haunted gold, and his face was so incredibly pale…

And then he buttoned his jeans with more dignity than she could ever have possessed in a moment like that. Turned on one heel, and limped away from her, deeper into the recesses of the crappy motel room. Marched past the cheap sink and into the bathroom. 

The door slammed behind him with such force that one hinge broke away from the wall, the screws dangling a little out of the jamb. 

She really couldn’t blame him for that, either. Like, not even a little bit.

/Oh God./ 

Her legs were not going to hold her up anymore, but she was so not going to sit on that bed. Staggering over to the nearest rickety excuse for a chair, she fell into it with a creak and surveyed the bodies. /Shit, shit, shit./

The shower had started in there, the faint roar of it resounding in the godawful silence as it echoed through the thin walls of the place. On either side of her, here in the corner, crappy wallpaper peeled a little. Bad print artwork tilted crazily on smoke-stained walls, and a broken TV listed to one side on a poorly-repaired particle-board-and-veneer entertainment center. The bed…

Her eyes juddered away from the tore-up bed to blink over to the corpses on the floor.

She could deal with demon corpses. She had dealt with demon corpses since she was fifteen.

/But how do I deal with demons who… Who were… Who had been…/ Her mind couldn’t quite manage to use the word. And ‘violated’ just seemed so… not enough for what she had witnessed.

Her mind shuddered away from everything that had just happened, closed down for a second into the blissful silence of simple logistics. She had a job to do. She would figure out what to do for... or about… Spike, and then…

And then she would… deal with the wider situation. Do what needed to be done, like she always did.

* * *

The rest is... Well... there's still some hard stuff, but the story is mostly comfort after this, aside from some tough conversations and detailed aftermath stuff.  
  
I promise never to watch a crime procedural after BtVS, ever again. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which things are aftermath-y and rough.  
It's all gonna get better from here on out, I swear.

The protective haze around Buffy’s mind remained in place while the dull, distant thunder of the shower did its work for Spike in the other room. She was well aware of what was going on for her by now. She had, after all, been here enough times before, knew that was exactly what this was. 

Her brain was protecting her from what she had seen and done. Not that she had had to  _ do _ much, per se, this time around… but what she had  _ seen _ … And, okay. She had done a  _ few _ things—or at least allowed some things to happen—that were totally not of the norm for her, which was…

Flashes leaked in; grainy snapshots escaping the tight control of her mind. A knife flashing. Wild amber eyes, fangs bared in agony. Grating, gloating, grunting, cruel laughter. A roar of helpless rage, while… parts fell to the floor in a gout of black blood. An aubergine face, bent sideways, twisted… All of them caught in some sort of surrealistic, melting poses, like something from that one painter? Salvador Dali—she remembered  _ his _ name, with the crazed, rubbery clocks and stuff—all kind of going askew, or that one, _The Scream,_ where some guy ran down the road like the kid from _Home Alone,_ but the colors were all wrong somehow and everything was coming to an end.

Things were falling. Walls. Barriers. Buffy was fighting inside herself, but it was hard to think of anything the same way as she had an hour ago. Everything had changed. Nothing was…

Thought stopped. Everything stopped. It was too much, and the only way to halt the impressions that sifted in, the processing she didn’t want to deal with, was to cease everything. To go still. So she hunkered down inside her mind like a hunted animal, and focused on  _ doing _ . /Don’t think. Just act. You’re the Slayer. That’s your  _ job _ . Thinking is for… those others. I just get… pointed at a target and… And…/

That very old thing that had been in her mind earlier sort of hissed in agreement… and then receded again to finally vanish, leaving her bereft. Which, in a way, sucked, because she could have used it right now. All that weird, incredibly primal energy—she had no idea where it had come from, but it seemed unbelievably ancient and entirely singular of focus—was now gone from her, leaving her feeling bizarrely bereft and almost… at sea in her own body. A body which, as she rose from the one rickety armchair to survey the room, felt oddly disused right now. She had felt more sinuous than usual, before, more deadly, more…

/More at home in myself, without all this thought. Just an animal doing a job./ Terrifying in and of itself, because, /I am not an animal. I’m a human person, and…/ 

And sometimes she wondered if she was becoming too much like the things she hunted, and killed, and…

Shoving that thought aside too, into the lockbox she kept in the back of her mind—there were a lot of them floating back there, in the dark seas, sinking slowly, labeled things like ‘Acathla’ and ‘Angelus’ and ‘that night’ and ‘what am I, really?’—she forged on with the current task. Better that than to let any of those awful casks bob up once more, into the light of recall.

None of them bore examining too closely.

/First things first… Spike so does not need to see these bastards whenever he comes out./ Two problems with that. These guys were big. And kind of all over the place, since Buffy had sort of dismembered the one who had come at her, and Spike had half-disemboweled the one who had been…

Well. They were in pieces. And these things were clearly not the helpful sort of demon who just went  _ poof _ . /Not everyone can be polite after slayage like vamps./ Say what you would about her most personally-irritating nemeses-demons, but they were handy when they went bye-bye. Not so much with the clean-up.

These jerks were double the fun, what with all the stanky black blood sinking into the cheap-ass carpet like used motor oil, and the clearly nasty clothes they had never washed in their lives, and the general grossness of the whole issue. And they were huge. And Buffy probably could have hefted them one by one and hucked them outside the tiny room, especially if she… Well, studying the problem, she could probably use the truly foul orange-and-yellow comforter from the bed to wrap up the corpses like a nice demon taco, use it for leverage and to conceal her activities from any wakeful motel-goers… but then what? /Where would I take them after that to hide them? The motel dumpster? They’d fill it up!/

Aside from which, the very thought of leaving Spike alone right now gave her a frisson of fear. She just… felt like that was the wrong thing to do, somehow, even if she might only be gone for a minute or two. And who knew how long it would actually take to get something like that done. The dumpster was probably all the way on the other side of the building, in the rear parking lot. Moving these idiots would take two, three trips easy, even using the blanket as a sling for miscellaneous body parts, and, just…

There could be more. /Bikers move in packs, right? What if they told somebody else they had Spike here? What if… more of them come while I’m out, and they drag him off somewhere else, or... He’s hurt, and maybe he can actually fight right now, but still./

No. She wasn’t about to just take off to go hoiking bodies around halfway across the property. Not right now. /Best I can do is wrap the things up in a nice, quiet blanket burrito, move ‘em to one side so he doesn’t have to look at ‘em, and maybe deal with ‘em after we talk and figure out… what we’re gonna do next./ There for sure needed to be a next step, but… /That should definitely be something… Well./ It shouldn’t be something she decided on her own. He had…

Spike had way more skin in this game than she did. He therefore had way more right than she did to decide what they should do next, how to handle… things.

At least for now, she could strip the bed. She doubted he’d want to look at that gross comforter anymore, after... 

Buffy didn’t even want to look at it. Heck, he probably wouldn’t want to look at the bed at all, but there was only so much furniture in the room, and until they figured out what to do next…

/I could’ve fought better. Why didn’t I  _ fight _ better? What went  _ wrong? _ / That fight was so one-sided that it didn’t even make any sense in retrospect. Here, with them on foot, she had taken the bastards apart, but back there, at Giles’ place… /If I’d just  _ fought _ better, he wouldn’t have.../

She had gone too still. Her hands had begun to shake. /No./ To go still again was dangerous. /Stop thinking./

Buffy absorbed herself in the task at hand for as long as possible.  _ Strip off the comforter. Lay it on some little bit of available real estate on the floor. Squish across the worn-out, blood-soaked carpet. Gather up an arm here, a… part there, toss them onto the center of said blanket. Try not to think about what you’re grabbing, in some cases. Hold with the fingertips if necessary, or by gross-ass clothing if possible. Hold your breath a lot. Drag bodies by belts and things. Heft them onto the middle of the comforter; one, two. And, done. Wrap the thing up by the corners, sling-style… and drag. _

The dragging thing was kind of a bitch, considering she had to get the stupid-heavy bundle around the end of the bed, and there really wasn’t much space left between there and the window-slash-wall, but she managed the long package in the end, with much sweating and cursing, yanked it over to the far side of the room, hopefully out of sight out of mind. Kicked a boot back into the blanket with a frown, tied the corners of the comforter together so it didn’t gap, then rubbed her forehead wearily with her arm, unsticking her bangs from her skin with a sigh. Toed the dark bloodstains on the floor, wishing she could do something about them before Spike came back out, but really, what could she do?

This room was never going to be the same, anyway. Which was why she didn’t think it was exactly a big deal, ruining the comforter too. It wasn’t like the dead biker-demons were going to get their security deposit back. /And it’s not like we’re on the hook for it. The motel-people don’t even know Spike and I are in here./

Stretching her back with a groan, Buffy turned away from the scene of the crime. Time to try to rinse off. Thank goodness the quarters were chilly and the assholes had had the curtains drawn, and… Well. The door she’d busted open had swung shut again of its own accord, but she couldn’t do much for the way it sort of dangled on its busted jamb. She did sort of wrestle it back into a kind of pretense of security as she passed it by on the way to the sink, hung it in place by what remained of its deadbolt-seat. It would have to do. 

Luckily this was one of those motel rooms where that facility was on the outside of the bathroom door. 

While mindlessly absorbed in the task of rinsing her face and hands of gore and nastiness, sweat and et cetera, Buffy became slowly aware that the water sliding over her hands was cold as hell even though she had it on hot, that the shower was still running on the other side of the door, had been for however long she’d been wrestling with demon bodies… and damn. Spike had really been in there for way too long.

She felt more tentative than she had really ever felt with any action she had ever taken in her life—up to and including broaching the subject of losing her virginity—as she lifted her fist to knock on that door; but this was a whole other ball of wax. This was someone else’s vulnerability here, and that was… 

Well, that was a big deal. ‘Fragile, handle with care’. “Spike? Are you okay in there?”

Nothing. /Crap./ “The, um… water’s probably pretty cold by now. And, um, I’ve got it more or less, you know, cleaned up out here if you wanna come out and… talk. About what to do next, or…” She trailed off into silence. Waited.

Still nothing.

Double crap.

/I’m gonna have to go in, aren’t I? Even if it’s just to see if he’s, like, bailed, or… Do upstairs motel bathrooms have exits?/ Honestly she wouldn’t blame Spike if he had jumped out the window and taken off. She might have done the same, after having an enemy-slash-sometimes-uneasy-ally see her going through… 

/Yeah. I so totally would have gone out the window. And probably never, ever come back./

Praying the door wasn’t locked, and that he hadn’t done what she definitely would have done, Buffy turned the creaky little knob. “I’m, um, going to come in and check on you,” she called softly. “Only because I’m, you know, worried.” She really felt super invasive about it, but it was probably just bad for him to stay in there for too long, right?

The gap slowly widened on silence, and a single dim bulb dangling from the ceiling without a shield, a cracked mirror, a toilet. A pile of dark, soiled clothing on the floor; crumpled jeans over Doc Martens, a blood-wet tee flung off to one side to cling damply to the side of the dust-caked, off-white fiberglass tub. The silicon caulking of the tub, Buffy noticed with obscene clarity, had seen better days. It was stained with mold spots, and the edges were peeling. One strip had come down a little, probably torn away from the wall by the violence with which Spike had hurled his sodden shirt away from himself when he’d…

Even with what she had seen earlier, she still didn’t expect the scene that met her eyes when she cracked the door wider to reveal the rest of the dingy bathroom. Spike was, indeed, still there. But he was hunched over, on the floor of the tub in a huddled ball, kind of canted over to one side so he wasn’t really sitting, per se; face buried between his knees while the freezing spray beat down on a pale body that was all skin and bone under the assault. 

He had bruises all over him; old marks and new. Fading stuff, maybe, from his incarceration with those commandos and his wild career for escape. Raw marks on his wrists that made her flinch, now, from the manacles they had only recently removed, that had kept him secure in the bathtub at Giles’ apartment and clearly visible where his arms were wrapped around his knees. 

How did someone that skinny fight as well as he did? /Oh, crap… Are we really… starving him?/ She’d thought he was just bitching, but he was so… thin! And she remembered now, though she had tried hard to forget, how bony he had felt under her body when they’d been under the Will-Be-Done spell, how much less vital than all those times they’d fought each other. /And I _know_ he had more muscles then, because I’ve seen the way he moves, and…/ 

And she couldn’t think about that right now. Right now he was freezing and he was a mess, and… And the water was definitely cold. The room was freezing.

Buffy came to life. Do. Don’t think. “I’m… gonna turn the water off, okay?” she informed him, and stepped over to knock the tap sharply into the downward position. 

Spike didn’t react at first, just remained in his motionless huddle, not even breathing. 

Buffy wasn’t sure what to say. Opened her mouth… And had every word she might ever have managed to utter was stolen from her when a curl of blood colored the now-still water underneath him.

/Oh God…/

Why wasn’t he… healing? What did those assholes  _ do _ to him? Wh… “Spike…”

The white head slowly lifted, to reveal no more game-face. Instead she saw unfathomable indigo eyes peering out between dripping curtains of shockingly curly, longish hair that dangled between them and over his nose. “Just leave me the bloody fuck alone, Slayer.” And those dark-blue eyes blazed with abrupt hate; enough so that she took an instinctive step back. 

She had never feared Spike, but the look in his eyes now…

Except… he wasn’t hating her. He was hating what she had seen, what she had walked in on, what she knew; and she got that. But he needed her right now; or anyway, he needed  _ someone _ . He was stuck with her, so he might as well deal. She firmed up her voice, her stance. “No.”

The glare turned deadly, and he snapped, swinging one arm away from his body in a wide arc. “D’you think this is the first sodding time this’s happened to me? It isn’t, yeah?” Something twisted in his face; something horrible and dark. “Been here, more than once, so you can go on your merry way…”

/Oh God…/ Just the thought that… Yeah, she knew he’d lived a very long time, but…

Suddenly Buffy felt really young, and very, very stupid. 

Spike must have seen her expression, because he drove in to capitalize, eyes flaring brighter in triumph. “Bloody hell; your prince, the mighty sodding Angelus has raped me, and he’s not the only one!”

Of course her first instinct was to lash out, snap at him that Angelus wasn’t her anything, that Angel was the vampire she’d loved… but now wasn’t the time. And besides; right now one side of her was screaming in denial, ‘Oh God, oh no, I don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to know  _ any _ of this,’ while another, saner part was calmly floating the realization that in this moment Spike was doing what… Well, what she would do in a situation like this.

He wanted her gone. So he was going for the throat. If he thought she was too young to deal, he would use anything he could to drive her away; up to and including whaling on any sore spot or hot button he could find. Any invasion, any vulnerability…

It put her back up. 

She straightened her spine again, met his gaze flatly.

His mouth tightened and he turned away to glare at a crack in the fiberglass wall of the bathtub with what appeared to be an overabundance of focus. “Think I know how to get on, so you can just bugger off.”

“No, I can’t,” she heard herself whisper.

His eyes jerked back around. For a moment he simply stared at her, clearly flummoxed. “Why the bloody hell not?” he burst out finally, exasperated.

/Why don’t I?/ She honestly wasn’t sure, except… “Because if it was me, I wouldn’t want to be left alone.” /Not really./

He sort of stared at her some more, as if she was some kind of new species of person he had never seen before, or like she’d grown a new head or something. After a minute or two, though, when it became clear to him that she wasn’t going to budge, he made some kind of sputtery, disgruntled, scoffing sort of noise and rose abruptly, unfolding out of the remaining dregs of faintly pinkish water so fast that she didn’t have time to look away. All she could do was avert her eyes, keep them on his face. Focus, when his gaze became too uncomfortable, on the well-made links of silver chain around his neck; the way it lay just so over his collarbones. God, they really stood out, didn’t they? 

/Okay, paying too much attention to his collarbones./ 

She jerked her eyes away to fumble for one of the few thin, over-washed white towels in the room for something to do, held one out for him while he watched her in clear amusement. “Hiding your blushing eyes, Slayer? Nothin’ you haven’t seen before, I’d imagine.”

She was blushing, okay, but… It wasn’t like she had ever expected to see Spike, of all people, in the buff. Well, except for eventually, that one time. But that was under a spell, so it didn’t count. None of the seriously dying to see—and enjoy—him naked in that context in any way counted. “I just… I figure, you know, you wouldn’t want to be… ogled right now…”

A sound exited him that sounded suspiciously like a dark chuckle. “Ogled, huh? Nice. ‘Preciate you preservin’ my dignity.” He took the towel from her, but he didn’t snatch it, and the almost gentle way he relieved her of the object, the strangely quiet way he moved as he wrapped it around his waist bespoke a thoughtfulness that made her wonder what he was making of this entire interaction.

Honestly, she had no clue either. She really had no idea what she was doing right now. She just knew she had to stick with him till she figured it out. 

“I’ll… uh…” Buffy looked around the room, preparing to exit so he could at least get dry and put on his pants in peace… but then her gaze fell on his jeans. 

They had blood in them. 

Oh. Oh god. 

She bit her lip, lifted her eyes to somewhere approximately at the level of his right shoulder. “Um, I cleaned up the room. I figured we could, you know, figure out what to do next, if the… If there was room to walk. I mean, the only furniture is the chair and the bed. I’m sorry about that, but…” He could take the chair if he didn’t want to sit on the bed, but considering the shape he was in… She wasn’t going to say it, though. 

He gave a wordless little one-shouldered shrug and turned for the door. He wasn’t, she noticed, moving at all with his usual feline grace, and she bit her lip as she followed him out. And halted abruptly to avoid running right into his damp, water-beaded back as he stopped dead to stare at the dim room. With full night coming on outside and the curtains drawn, the splintered door now pulled to, the only light in there came from what managed to leak between the ugly seventies-gold material at the window, from the neon sign outside and the streetlights out there. The bed looked a lot different now, luckily, with just the threadbare, bleached sheets and the beige blanket on it, the bodies a nearly-invisible bundle wrapped in gold-and-orange on the far side.

For some reason, Buffy was feeling weirdly in need of justifying her actions. “I, um, didn’t want to leave to get rid of them. Not for now, anyway. In case, you know, they had friends. I can, if it bugs you too much, but I figured I’d ask you first. So if…”

“It’s fine, Slayer,” Spike answered gruffly, and waved his non-towel-holding hand. “Out of sight, out of mind. I’m not a shrinking violet.”

She knew that. She just… felt bad. Like maybe she should have made the effort. Except…

He shuffled over to the bare mattress. Stood beside it for a moment, and she could tell he was frowning, even though his back was to her. “So, now what?” he asked, tension singing across his shoulders.

Buffy did her own share of shrugging, trying to sound nonchalant. “Well, I mean, first order of business is probably getting your clothes in some kind of wearable shape. We’re not going to be able to smuggle you out of here in a towel, so I figure I’ll run some more of that nice cold water in there, throw ‘em in…”

His head turned, and he favored her with a quizzical profile and glittering, startled blues. “Why the bloody hell should you do that? I can wash my own sodding clothes, yeah?”

Buffy shrugged. “I guess, if you want to, but it’ll be easier if I do it, since you’re kind…”

“I’m not fucking debilitated!” he snapped, and wow, he was so on edge. 

“I wasn’t…” /Oh man./ “I just meant, you know, that doing something like that while holding a towel on…” Though she supposed if he was alone in there he probably would do it naked. “Whatever way you wanna play it. But I am a past-master at getting every weird kind of blood out of clothes. Slayer, right? Plus,” she managed as lightly as possible, “you know, girl. Been one of those for even longer.” She almost managed not to blush at that last, feeling an odd kinship in this moment with this guy, this vampire.

Spike’s nostrils flared a little, and he closed his eyes, turned away. “Did notice that, Slayer.” 

She kept her voice steady. “I’ll just… get them started. If you want to finish, that’s up to you.”

“Sure.” The lightness in his voice probably cost him, too. But she figured he’d probably be happier if she was out of the room while he struggled to find a comfortable position in there, anyway. 

“Back in a few.” She wasn’t sure why she felt the need to reassure him of that, especially since he didn’t answer, but what the heck. The words were out before she could censor them. 

He remained still as if carven from tense ice until she turned away.

Back in the bathroom, Buffy stared down at the scattered pile of clothes on the floor, feeling disjointed and far from herself. Wreck of a tee, black-on-black. Black cotton, covered in black blood, gleaming wetly in the fitful light of a bare bulb, slightly swinging. Crumpled jeans, sagging over boot-tops; lying there like an accusation, stained red inside…

Turning away, she levered the tub-stopper, cranked on the cold water. Stared at that instead. And after the water was about three inches deep, she caught up the jeans with mechanical precision. Hesitated… and then forced herself to delve briefly into the pockets. Pulled out the contents; to whit, one battered silver Zippo (the cigarettes he had had on him back at Giles’ place had dropped unceremoniously to the sidewalk when he’d been… grabbed), about thirty cents in change, a little ring bearing a tiny key that looked like it went to a safe-deposit box or something and a much larger one that probably went to that huge old car of his… and a scuffed-looking men’s wallet in black leather. She did not investigate the contents of the wallet, though once she might have done so if only to see if he’d stolen it. She just put everything on the dingy bathroom counter and pulled the jeans briskly in under the faucet so the weak flow could sluice through the marks of damage, wash them away. 

The water pinkened in swirls. 

She dropped the jeans, turned away again. Found the shirt, threw it carelessly in the other end of the tub and found the toilet. Shut it and sat, pulling her knees up to her chest. 

/Oh God, oh God…/

***

She ran the water three times, till it came out clear. Took a while, with the thick ichor the demons had bled out. Finally, though, she was left to wring the water from the shirt—easy enough a task—and the jeans—that took some Slayer-strength to really make some progress—and, finally, with a deep breath she draped both wet articles over her left arm, picked up the boots with her right (they actually didn’t smell like much but leather, and did vampires even sweat?—and held her breath as she pushed open the door. 

He was invisible at first, the lone blanket was pulled so high up. She marked him only by the lump of his presence, and the small, visible tuft of pale hair on one worn, deflated pillow. 

After a moment she figured out why he looked so odd. His back was to her. He was curled up on the bed with his back to the bathroom. She hadn’t expected that; hadn’t expected him to be facing… Well, the demon-burrito over there. If it were her, she wouldn’t want to look at… that. But it was his call. 

Saying nothing, she exited the little sink-nook to head for the radiator. Praying it worked at all, she plumped the boots down on the floor next to the lone seat, set aside the wet articles on the rickety card table with its peeling ‘wood’ veneer, then bent to crank the thing on to full-blast. It was chilly in here anyway. She should’ve turned it on before she went in to wash stuff. 

“Gonna stink up the place, you warm it up with those things still in here.”

The sudden intrusion of his voice startled her. She hadn’t expected him to speak up, either. “Oh. Um, well… We need to dry your clothes, and I thought…” She shrugged. “I can drag ‘em out. I mean, if you feel safe for a few. Not that I think we’ll be here long enough for them to, you know.” /Rot./ Though to be fair, she honestly hadn’t thought that far ahead.

Truly, she hadn’t thought further ahead than the next five minutes. /I have no clue what I’m doing./ And really, she figured it was better to continue with the current not-thinking plan. It was working for her so far. 

Since Spike did not seem disposed to answer at the moment, Buffy went ahead with the business of spreading the tee and jeans over the flagging radiator. It seemed to be putting out some heat, at least, if unevenly. Most of it would be blocked by her clothes-drying endeavors, but it would maybe work if she could somehow get…

Maybe one leg at a time, and half the shirt now, and half later. She would have to turn them in a little while, though, like pancakes. /Maybe check ‘em in an hour?/

She finished her artistic draping. Twitched a little at a sleeve, held her hand above the one uncovered segment of radiator, frowned at the weak output. It was warm, if not strong. /God, hopefully they’ll even be dry by morning./ They would figure out what to do next then. /Like, maybe get food. Man, I’m hungry./ Her late lunch at school had so been forever ago, eaten on the run between classes. She had kind of expected Giles to feed her, but that had pretty much gone out the window, what with the whole chasing down demon-bikers thing, and…

/You’ve survived worse, Buffy. You’ll live till morning, and then…/

“Why you doin’ this, Slayer?”

Arrested mid-pondering, Buffy blinked up at the reclining vampire. “What?”

He didn’t exactly sit up, but he had turned to face her, propping himself as he did so. The blanket and sheet fell around his waist, revealing a bruised, pale, and exceedingly thin, but very muscled torso. She blushed and jerked her eyes back to his, and… Wow. Those eyes. They were really, really dark blue right now, and strangely wild. Hard, kind of haunted… A crazy contrast to that… 

Okay, had Spike’s hair always been so… poofy and curly? It was mostly dried now, and it was kind of flat on one side from laying down, but it really was just all over the place. 

Seriously unexpected. “What do you m…”

“Treatin’ me like a person?” he demanded. “If it’s pity…”

/Oh./ He thought…

She shook her head, still feeling in a daze. “It’s not. I… It’s hard not to see you as a person when…” Shook her head, stopped. Shrugged a little. “Besides… it’s my job, right? I protect… people, and help them when… they can’t protect themselves, and I…” /I take care of the outcasts and the strays./ It had just never occurred to her before now that that’s what Spike was. An outcast, a stray… or a person. Just like the rest of her ragged little tribe. 

Understandable, since until recently he had professed a very real wish to eat, or at least murder his way through, most of them. But… /You gave your word. And you need our help, and you… Right now you’re… at risk from a danger in this town. Several ones, I guess, and…/

That made him… like them. Just another outcast, another stray. 

/I suppose that means you really are kind of… one of us right now./

Today had very much brought that truth home to her, the way even seeing him sizzling and pale on Giles’ porch and begging entre had not done.

“Still doesn’t make me people, in your eyes, yeah?” he demanded harshly. 

Buffy closed said eyes, teetering on the edge of something vast, an admission that might break everything for her. Her entire world was about to cave in, everything she held dear. Definitions she clung to with all her might, to keep herself sane so that she could do her job without thinking; so that she could fight every night without hurting, or wondering… they were all about to come crashing in all around her. Everything Angelus had done… ‘No soul equals all evil’… 

/He’s not acting all evil right now. And did he, ever?/

Everything Angel had said… ‘No soul means can’t love’…

/Except… Drusilla./ A stake to her breast and everything had stopped.  _ Everything _ , in naked terror.

Everything Giles had ever told her…

/Well, not  _ everything _ ./ A very old memory perked to the surface of her consciousness, bobbing up to the dark, oily light of recognition in that cavernous, watery space where she hid the things she never wanted to consider. 

She remembered that day, in the school library, shortly before she had found out she was a girl marked to die. Giles, telling them the world used to belong to the demons; way before humanity had come into play. That the ancient demons were finally driven out by humanity, and the last demon to leave this dimension fed off of a human. ‘Mixed their blood,’ Giles had told her. ‘He was a human form possessed, infected by the demon's soul.’

“The demon’s soul,” Buffy whispered into the dark of the motel room.

“Beg pardon, pet?”

She would have told him not to call her that, snapped it out automatically, but she was too floored by the implications of memory to notice his words.  _ “Oh…” _ she whispered softly to herself, and felt her eyes flee to catch Spike’s, dark blue as indigo in the low light, and wide-pupiled as a cat’s. Hard, and wondering. “He said that demons have souls. And I never even remembered it till now.”

Spike leaned back a little on his elbow, a faint smirk touching his eyes in the dark. “We’re different, Slayer, and I’m a monster… but I’m not as big a monster as some, and definitely not as much a one as you like to make out.” His eyes jerked away from hers to touch the coverlet, where his hands were spread. One curled against the sheet. “Some of us, sure… but not all of us, anyway. Which goes for humans too, innit?”

He had a point. And… 

And it ruined everything. “I guess,” she told him quietly, “you always were a person, weren’t you?” Nothing would ever be easy anymore. Nothing.

She felt his gaze, had to meet it. It was the hardest thing she had had to do in a very long time; up to and including facing down Angelus after they… 

Spike stared at her for a moment, as if he could see into her soul. And then the corner of his mouth twitched. “Took you long enough, Slayer,” he told her quietly, and turned away again to lie with his back to her on the bed.

***

By midnight, the continued radio-silence from Mag and Klyed sparked minor annoyance from Razor and the boys. It was one thing to have a few too many while scouting the possibilities. It was entirely another to have all the fun without the brothers. “Boys,” Razor roared, “let’s saddle up.” 

As the rest of the Hellions roused themselves from the wreckage of the bar they had just despoiled out here in Ojala and moved to mount their mules, Razor stroked his chin with the long blades depending from one hand. “Seems we have a reckoning to make with the local hellmouth. And about time. About time.”

They exited the bar, stepped up. Swinging aboard his own mule, Razor lifted his arm, to the cacophony of roaring engines. “Hellions! Let’s ride!”

The roar of his boys nearly drowned out that of the bikes as they tore off down the broken asphalt toward Sunnydale.

* * *

And so we enter our 'base under siege' model, heh. It's a pretty extreme reason to lock Spuffy in a room together for a coupla days, but you know. Dreams do what dreams do.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize that I'm late on this. I really did think I'd posted it before.

Probably she should call someone, let them know what had happened, where she was. Where Spike was, and that he wasn’t off somewhere getting into trouble; at least so the whole Scooby pack didn’t spend the night out looking for them. But.

She just couldn’t seem to make herself pick up the old, scraped-up beige phone over there on the nightstand next to the bed, behind Spike's vulnerable-looking, turned back. It just felt like it would be… Whatever. Some kind of weird betrayal or something to spill it all to her friends. What he had been through. Why she was staying. Why… everything. 

Except… /If I call and  _ don’t _ tell them, they won’t get  _ why _ I’m staying. Why I don’t want them to come pick us up. Why…/

God. If she called and  _ didn’t _ tell them everything, Giles would come with his car and grab her, and insist on… On…

On tying Spike up again for ‘running off’. And the thought of Spike being… re-victimized like that, tied up in the bathtub of Giles apartment, sitting up on that hard surface with no real way to move around, until someone noticed that he was…

Bleeding…

Her mind shuddered away. /No./   
  
And besides. She had disappeared overnight before now, on the prowl for something. They had learned to accept that she might be busy hunting something, dealing with a baddie, whatever. They might worry, but they would deal. /They won’t convince Wil to, like, do a locator spell for us tonight, right? If I don’t call?/ 

One night’s grace was all she could hope for, obviously. If she pushed it too long, they so would, and Wil so would, and then scenario A with the racing-over Giles and the tying up of Spike would commence, and she’d have to tell them why she had so suddenly gone all one-eighty on them with the way she was acting with their dependent vampire, which… In all honesty, she really wasn’t even sure she could truly explain it to herself, except that…

/Okay, dammit. I’ve seen him get beat up plenty. Heck, I’ve given him the beat-down plenty of times, and enjoyed it, which is probably a sad comment on me, but whatever. Slayer, vampire. I’m pretty sure he gets a kick out of it too, or he wouldn’t have, like, totally prolonged our fight when he had the Gem. He would’ve just taken me out and gotten it over with, right?/ 

Tough to admit that to herself, since in that particular case she had been too thrown by his presence in the taboo daylight, by his expanded Master-vamp buzz, and too emotionally off her game in general to fight well, and had thus been pissed as hell to have ended up on the receiving end of an ass-whipping from William the Bloody. It had, after all, been kind of a first. She was fairly used to being on top with him, and it had thrown her off to no end to almost lose a fight to him. To have him toy with her like that, and to know that only quick thinking and the nice, extra  _ oomph _ of rage gifted her by his idiot mouth had saved her butt. That, dammit, she probably would have gone down to him that day if he hadn’t been so willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, because whether she wanted to admit it to herself or not, he had been enjoying the damn contest. 

She had lied to herself about it for months. Because, okay… admitting that Spike enjoyed fighting with her too much to kill her—and worse, that she maybe kind of enjoyed fighting with him too much to really dust him unless she really, really had to—was anathema. It was a complete and total dereliction of duty, it was sick and wrong and…

Anyway, fine. She might just kind of enjoy competing with Spike. Might, just maybe, miss it, and hate on some very small level that those commando jerks had taken away the one actual challenge she ever met around Sunnydale who wasn’t, for the most part, apocalypse-level material. Spike gave her a great fight, but he never tried to end the world. And in a repetitive, humdrum life of dusting no-challenge fledges and slavering, idiot demons who always rushed her with no skill and no brains half the time, tangling someone like him was…

/Okay, so I miss fighting you. And beating you. And I think it kind of sucks that you’re… gelded or whatever. And this sucks even more, how you are right now, because whatever I’ve thought of you—and even if fighting you and never quite beating you also means you’re annoying as hell and a total thorn in my side that I can’t quite pick out—it doesn’t mean that I ever wanted… this./

And that was the problem. The corollary. The B-side that had caused her one-eighty. 

Beat-downs for Spike she could see. She could even administer them, if he was in a place to give them right back (since otherwise it was kind of no fun and made her feel vaguely ashamed, even when she hit him out of reflex, like he was some kind of animated punching bag)… But  _ this? _

Just no. _No_ one deserved this. 

/Well, maybe Angelu…/

She shook her head hard to get rid of that highly unproductive jag of vindictive emotion, tamped it down, shoved it back, deep into the dark well at the back of her mind. /Anyway, Spike’s different. He doesn’t… torture, much less…/ 

More brain-skipping.

/Anyway, he also… loves, in his own weird, demon-y way. Which is more than I can say for some vampire-demons. It’s… almost human, in some bizarre way. And anyway, whatever he deserves—a good clean staking in a fair fight, mostly—for all the stuff he’s done in his unlife, he _didn’t_ deserve this, and if I…/

Okay, she was over-identifying too much, and maybe trying to see too much humanity in Spike right now, but it was kind of tough not to when he had just gone through, was going through something like this; something a lot worse than a beat-down, or some torture, even.

Right now, he was way too vulnerable for her to see him as anything like the one-note demonic adversary she always tried to see in him, and that made it really, really difficult to hate him, or despise him, or want him locked up somewhere. 

It actually made it really tough not to want to keep him safe, protect him even from her friends, who wouldn’t understand that there was maybe more to him than there was to most vamps. /Maybe if they knew.../   
  
But no. It wasn’t hers to tell. 

For one thing, if it were her there was no way in hell she would ever want a whole troop of enemies to know about something like this. Not people like Xander, who did nothing but hate on him, and Giles, who treated him like a barely-tolerable life-form; possibly worth studying, but mostly deplorable. Not even Willow, who might at best pity him. 

The only one who would handle it well would possibly be Anya, but she would most likely make some kind of off-color remark about anatomy and then try to be comforting, but do so by talking about how she wished she still had her vengeance powers so she could have his back, even though it would be outside her normal rubric of righting the wrongs done to women scorned… and then start describing all the things she could do to abuse the transgressors’ ill-fated anatomy. 

Not all that comforting, really.

The whole thing was a just world of no. Besides, aside from Anya it probably it wouldn’t change their minds much even if they knew. It definitely wouldn’t change Xander’s. He’d probably just say something gross about Spike deserving this, if only so he wouldn’t really have to think about it; or how it didn’t matter because Spike was just a thing and not a person, or…

Buffy stoically averted her eyes from the phone. With any luck, she had bought them tonight. And surely Spike would be… healed up by tomorrow, and they would figure out a game plan, and then…

Reaching out one-armed, she resolutely flipped his t-shirt as if testing the done-ness of a flapjack. And, well… if not thoroughly dry, it was at least measurably less damp on the radiator side than it had been, which was promising. Probably it would dry out by morning. 

The jeans might be a whole other saga, but maybe they would at least be somewhat wearable, and then they could… Well. Leave the motel, find some sane way to explain things to Giles and the Scoobies without having to tell them everything. 

She could spend the night thinking up some kind of story that would be plausible enough to convince them. Something that sounded like a believable ‘Buffy was out all night with Spike and didn’t bother to call, or couldn’t,’ kind of story, but one that didn’t make Spike the bad guy, somehow. /We saw the bikers, he knew they were baddies, he told me some stuff about them, we chased them down, took ‘em out, and then…/

Inspiration failed her. She didn’t know enough about said demon bikers, was the thing. Really, she didn’t know enough about bikers in general to be convincing. 

“Uh… Spike? You… awake?”

He was. She could actually see his shoulders tense from his nest of blankets, even in the gloomy lighting (she had had left the light on in the bathroom, but that one tiny bulb wasn’t casting a whole heck of a glow past the sink). Still, she could see in the dark better than most people. Like, not vamp-level or anything, but pretty okay, and did he have to ripple like that when he tensed? 

Not that she was looking at his shoulders or anything. 

“You do know that I’m a vampire, right?” he reminded her in a mildly sarcastic voice.

“Oh. Right,” she answered, feeling mildly stupid. It was barely maybe midnight. Of  _ course _ he was wide awake. “I, um, don’t want to bother you, but I… had a logistical question.” And probably it would be a huge sore spot to pick at right now, but dangit, she seriously needed to know. 

Besides, it would pass the time. She was so definitely not going to sleep with him and a couple of demon corpses in the room, especially when more of their buddies might show up at any minute to attack. Not when Spike was in this bad a shape. She had to defend them both until he was back on his feet, and that meant keeping her guard up. 

It also meant learning anything she could about their common enemy; something she could use whenever they _did_ come looking for their peeps. “Uh… Not to bring up…”

To her surprise, Spike flipped over very abruptly on the bed to pin her with a startlingly intense glare. His eyes narrowed to blue triangles that seemed to drill into her. “Never knew you to be so bloody retiring, Slayer. Hate to think it was all just for me. Spit it out, yeah? I’m not a sodding wallflower.”

She looked away, but fine. He was right. There was really no easy way around the conversation, so she pulled in a deep breath and firmed up her resolve. If it bothered him to talk about them, he would just have to deal, right? “Uh… what are our chances of more of these jerks showing up? I mean, do you know? I guess I just don’t know how much you know about them, if, like, anything really, but I’m kind of guessing you must know something, since they seemed to have kind of a…”

“Personal issue with me?” Spike took up when she trailed off, blushing. His voice had taken on that caustic, satirical tone that said he was fighting to stay tough, brash, bruising. “Yeah, they have a grudge, though I was kinda hopin’ they’d’ve forgotten about it by now.”

The admission drew her eyes back to his. “Why?”

He sighed and flopped his arm over his knee where it stood propping up the sheet, and did he have to sprawl like that with his legs wide open, with only a sheet between them? He knew he was naked under there, right? It was… indecent. And weird, considering what had just… What he just… But it was like he was totally unconcerned about his… vulnerable state around her or something, which was bizarre considering they were also technically enemies. “I cheated them at poker,” he informed her, and now a faint, proud smile was tickling at the corners of his lips. Almost a smirk.

She stared, floored. “They…” She couldn’t even say it. Waved a hand around the room, blown away. “Because you cheated them at  _ poker?”  _ Demons were so the complete worst.

“It was a high-stakes game, luv. And was more than that,” he admitted finally. “Said I was the same one had swindled the gang in another city, which was a load of tosh. Didn’t need to take that kind of insult, so I went after the lot.”

She was admittedly nonplussed at that one. “You fought… By  _ yourself?” _ His grin broadened, and of course he looked all stupidly conceited. “How many?” she breathed, feeling something like awed and something like dumbfounded by the sheer foolhardiness of a brawler willing to risk being dusted just for the sake of some revelry. Spike was a damn fine combatant, sure, but those guys had been nothing to sneeze at either. 

She had known that Spike was an idiot, but this seriously took the cake.

“Only four, Slayer. Nothing like too massive an undertaking, yeah?” His arrogant grin turned into something that probably should have cracked his face in half, and he rolled his tongue behind his teeth in that evil way he had, tapped it once decisively. Tilted his head a little at her as if considering her horrified expression, and went completely smug. “I took those arseholes  _ apart _ .”

/Oh my God…/ “Because they  _ insulted _ you?” He was insane. He was actually, certifiably insane.

The crazed grin sobered, and the dancing cobalt eyes stilled, clouded. The disheveled, pale head turned away as his gaze descended abruptly to study the rumpled coverlet. “No. They threatened Dru. She came down right then. Always did have terrible timing. Knew when I was in trouble, yeah? Sire-bond told her. Came to help me; ‘cept she was still weak from what those bastards’d done to her in Prague, so she wasn’t much help. Two of ‘em went after her, told me they’d use her and make me watch.” All cocksure amusement had fled from his posture, replaced with a haunted air. “Lost my bloody mind, innit? Tore ‘em to shreds and got her the bloody fuck out of there. Never looked back.”

/Oh. Oh shit./ She had seen what Spike would do, what he would give up when Drusilla was threatened, and that was everything. Every scheme, every plot, every shred of dignity or standing in the demon community. All of it. “When was this?” she heard herself whisper. /Had to have been a while ago. Before the chip, and coming back, since he and Ms. Crazypants broke up after…/ After the last time he’d given up everything for Drusilla’s sake, thrown in with the white hats against his own kind, his own grandsire, to boot.

He was regaining his equanimity, and threw out the answer as if it were nothing. “Oh, couple years back. ‘Fore I first came to dear old Sunnyhell. Threw our shite in the DeSoto and hustled us outta that town to head here.” The arm propped on the knee rose, and his hand sort of ruffled through his shock of hair to the tune of his new, rueful tones, and now that he’d drawn her attention to it, woah. Fully dry now and sans his usual disciplined gel situation, he actually had a lot more hair than Buffy was really prepared for. She was used to seeing it all… contained. Pinned down and… controlled. Which, she supposed, he probably did as much to keep it out of his face in case of a fight as for image’s sake, because the way it hung now, sort of curly and dangling around his ears and over his forehead, was endearing, softened his whole look, and was, frankly, kind of adorab… 

/ _ No _ . Not adorable. Stop that, Buffy!/ It was… undisciplined. And strangely sweet, the way it puffed up into a riot of platinum curls, and framed his face in a strangely unguarded way that made him seem a whole lot less edgy and a whole lot softer, and, just… /Who knew, Spike?/

“…Thought I’d seen the backs o’ the sods, but I guess not.”

Jerking her attention back to the conversation, Buffy bit her lip hard and seriously considered slapping herself across the face. The problem was that the stupid sheet was hanging like that around his waist, and it was exposing way too much skin, and was it her fault that he looked… Like that? All smaller than normal--almost shrunken--and vulnerable. Exposed and approachable, without the dark clothes and the duster and the sneer and the weird, punk hauteur which normally made him seem all bigger than life and tough and snarky and edgy and…

Did he have to look so _young? _

/_Stop_ that! God, that stupid spell really messed up your brain, Buffy, but you need to get _over_ it./ She was being incredibly inappropriate, considering, well, basically everything. And he shouldn’t look remotely like he looked, because it was stupid. “I guess they tracked you down,” she managed, and cleared her throat.

Lost in his own thoughts, Spike dropped his hand again, so his elbow remained balanced on his knee and his hand was framed in the cradle of his legs. He seemed totally at ease in her presence, or at least totally at ease with himself, which made literally zero sense to Buffy considering the circumstances. Really, considering any circumstances involving the two of  _ them _ , much less the current ones… and she was going to have to stop watching his bizarrely open body language and focus on his equally-bizarrely-expressive face, because she was losing her mind or something. Probably it was exhaustion. Anyway, Spike had always had a super-mobile face, so it would make paying attention to his expressions easier. 

“Might have done sooner, ‘f I wasn’t on your turf. That lot loves a good hellmouth, sure, much as any of their type do… but not when there’s a sheriff in town.”

Thrown out of her increasingly confused absorption, Buffy jerked, and then blinked at this description.  _ “Excuse _ me?”

“Oh, c’mon, Slayer, what the bloody hell do you think you are in this shitehole of a burgh but the lawman? You come in like the gunslinger in a lawless frontier town, wave your stake around and say, ‘the law’s here now, so behave or you’re dead’, and the whole sodding lot of us better fall in line or pay the consequence, yeah? No higher law on your side, the side as defends the poor defenseless bloodbags wanderin’ the streets in the daylight. We’ve got our own big guns to fear, so we have our balancing act to manage…” 

At her probably deeply blank look he half-growled, plainly stunned at her lack of comprehension. “Appeasing whatever idiot high mucky-muck demon lord or petty princeling’s set up shop in some cave down here,” he elaborated patiently, “and wants a tribute of babies or some such shite, since mostly none of us can get together the muscle enough to shut the thing up so it’ll leave us be. As if most fools ever wanna get on your bad side, or even come to your notice at all an’ risk gettin’ dead, when they could just spend their time mindin’ their own bloody business.” He rolled his eyes at her dumbfounded expression. “A course, there’re always enterprisin’ sorts like that idjit Annoyin’ One, gettin’ ambitious; or even fools like me who just wanna get on your bad side ‘cause it’s fun…” And he grinned then, right to her face. “But as to the rest? Rock and a bloody hard place, innit?”

The recitation stunned her. It had never occurred to her that lesser demons might resent having to pay all those gross tributes; being forced, by extension, to get on her bad side by collecting the babies or virgin blood or whatever the hell it was that week. But it sounded like Spike was saying a lot of them would much rather just… not.

What a crazy thought. 

“‘S what it is, though, with you in town. ‘Less you get wind of it first, a’ course, and knock the bastards off for us. Sodding cheese-grater, who’ll get you first; the bigger bad, or the wee chit with the big sword.” He threw her a look that was half sarcasm and half admiration. “The biggest bad.” 

/ _ I’m _ the biggest bad?/

Spike grunted sourly then. Flicked his fingers like he wished he had a cigarette, lips twisting in his habitual, dismissive half-sneer. “Well, not me. I never cared to pay obeisance to any priests or deities; but loads do. So you’ve got your locals, stuck here putting up with them and you and just as tired of it as the humans, and you’ve got the weekend warriors who either came in to use the hellmouth vibes to bring back Rashmah the Great on the third moon of Dick because they wanna end the bloody world; or you have the ones who are only doin’ it because they’re scared not to and are hopin’ like hell you’ll crash the party first so they won’t die doin’ it, an’ maybe you won’t kill ‘em for bringin’ in whatever bloody idiot tribute the sod asked for. You’ve got tourists who only come to see what a real hellmouth is like, who get soused, party hard for a day or two, and either get dusted by you, pet, or leave again if they manage not to run afoul of you first…” He shrugged, clearly uncaring. “And you’ve got bastards like these. Fucking tourists gone bug-shaggin’ nuts on the energy of the place, who wanna taste an all-powerful evil, get juiced, ride the high, and tear shit up because it’s fun. And believe me;  _ none _ of the locals like them. They ruin the party for  _ everyone _ .”

Buffy stared at him, open-mouthed, amazed, and rocked to her core by his catalogue. It was such an impassioned rundown, had such a ring of sincerity—like a thing he had been dying to rant about for a long-ass time—that she didn’t doubt for a minute that he was telling her the god’s honest truth as he knew it. It certainly matched up to her own experiences thus far, gave them a bit of a backstory. 

All too abruptly now, she remembered something that he had said when they had been… well… pseudo-engaged. She had been sure he was gonna go all ‘old-vampire caveman’ on her and try to take her work from her; the work she had finally accepted as her own, as identity and purpose and right. Instead he had turned the whole thing on its head and told her,  _ “Let's see… do I want you to give up killing all my friends? Yeah, I've given it some thought.” _

At the time it had seemed like a dumb vampire comment, and her inner response had gone something like, ‘Sure, of course, but all your friends are at best jerks and at worst soulless killers, right?’ But what if… 

It was just… It had, for one, never once occurred to her that there were demons who didn’t want to participate in the ceremonials she had to break up every third weekend here in Sunnydale. That they were maybe only doing them because some heavy was leaning on them and they were terrified not to. But man if it didn’t make sense, considering some of the really crappy fights she’d had to put up with to protect said rituals. Heck; it had never remotely occurred to her that there were classifications between ‘local’ and ‘tourist’, or ‘zealot’ and ‘unwilling sycophant’ in the demonic ranks. Now the very thought terrified her, because what it all meant was…

It meant that there were probably some perfectly inoffensive demons out there, just as terrified as the ones who had never bothered her or hurt anyone, and probably she had killed a few of them because they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or because they were trapped in a bad sitch. /They might even help me stop some of these rituals if I…/

She shook herself. /How could I even know the  _ difference? _ It’s not like there’s time to quiz everyone before I stop these things! And all Giles’ books say that they’re all bad and evil and up to no good and…/ “That… doesn’t make any sense! The books…”

“Who  _ wrote _ those books, Slayer?" he snapped back. "Where’d they get their information, and what was their agenda? Ever ask yourself that?”

Buffy sat back hard against her chair, mind whirling so hard that she had no ability to process the information therein. She could not even grab hold of one ephemeral thought as it slid by to examine it before another did a flyby—_whoosh—to_ replace it.

“Pretty easy to keep a tool doin’ the job you want it to,” Spike told her quietly, “if you keep it convinced that everyone she goes after is little more than a deadly, predictable animal, not one different from the other. Even when they admit all the while that every one’s a different species that abides by different rules and the lot. Nothin’ in common, some of us, so why would we all behave the same, have the same goals, the same types of souls…”

She closed her eyes, shook her head, unable to hear this. 

Spike’s voice went quiet, reflective, and for a brief moment his tones turned strangely smoother, less choppy; almost… Giles-y. “Any road, I have the sneaking suspicion those tossers never asked a single demon direct about any of the business to get their information; or if they did, they asked someone’s mortal enemy and wrote down what they said. Loads of misinformation in there from what I saw in Watcher’s flat.” The sneer was back, the Cockney and the tightness, along with the derision. “Sheer rubbish, the load of it, and what there was was accurate was pretty sodding outdated. We  _ do _ change and evolve, you know? What a Therakahn acted like in the thirteenth century was a far cry from how they act now, yeah? For one, they don’t even  _ have _ fertile plains like that in that part of the world anymore, and haven’t for centuries, but see them changing the entry? Sods in that Council of his haven’t had a new idea since they began, I’ll wager, and wouldn’t let a new one in if you paid ‘em in kittens.” He scoffed, viciously.

Buffy’s voice was shaking as she interrupted. “Just… tell me about the bikers,” she whispered. “I can’t… deal with this right now.”

There was a short, pointed silence… and then, for a wonder, he took pity on her. “They’re not like most,” he answered quietly. “Human bike clubs are alright, yeah? Most, any road. Ride about like a load of great soft sodding teddy bears, raising money for kids as have cancer, or helping look for the ones have Amber Alerts on ‘em an’ all that rot, or just enjoy the Sunday sunshine. A few are outlaw gangs, sure, get up to a fair bit of nonsense. Drugs an’ the like, but nothing like these.” His mouth turned to a hard line. “The Hellions only let a few humans in… worst of the bloody worst. Most humans wouldn’t survive their crew. Most…” He shook his head; one sharp jerk of negation. “No idea of their species. Never wanted to know. Tough buggers, obviously. Travel in packs of about thirty at a go. Dunno how many chapters they have, but I’ve seen ‘em in at least three cities, so they’re about.”

Buffy felt the welcome tightness spreading through her, freezing thought, chasing away the uncertainty and the horror his previous words had produced. This, she could fight. This was unequivocal. “And they’re bad.”

“The worst.” His answer was immediate and without compunction. “They like raping, they like killing, they like torture, they like…” He shrugged a little. “Well. Everyone likes a little pillaging and looting, sure, and this lot will tear up a town like nobody’s business. Break open the shops, nick everything they can carry or just break the windows for fun and light the rest on fire. I was in the Blackout in New York in ’77. It was a bleedin’ good time, I’ll admit, but they could do half that damage on their own.”

The reminder that this vampire could enjoy some of the same things these demons had, and would—that he had in the past—should really put her off, but based on some of the things he’d already said she kind of thought the rape part had never been on Spike’s agenda, which more or less put him in a lower category of bad. She set it aside for later. “And… I’m assuming they have radios on their bikes.”

“Probably.” His voice was tight as he said it.

“So… they might have told their buddies that they found you here?”

“Could have.” The syllables were bitten off. His face showed none of the anxiety he must be feeling at the thought, but suddenly his choice was made clear to her. He had lain facing the corpses because he would rather have his back to the enemy he knew and, at least in this moment, somewhat trusted and with whom he had a tentative truce, than to… that. 

He had needed to face them. Just in case. 

The words slipped from her. “I’ll stay awake.”

His response was immediate and clipped. “No need, Slayer. I’m used to being up at night. I’ll wake you if there’s a need.” A wry twist came to his lips, and he moved to swing his legs over the edge of the mattress. Winced slightly, and his expression hardened as he wrapped the sheet about himself like a shield. “You should actually take the bed, Slayer. You’re the one as sleeps nights…”

She stared at him, alarm bells going off in her head for about fifty reasons. One, he should be not, well, sitting, so where was he going to go? The floor? That was hard and kind of nasty, what with the drying demon-blood, so ew. Two, she would so not be able to sleep with him here, anyway; somewhere in the room, naked and vulnerable and needing protection, and maybe watching her. Especially not with a broken door on the chamber, and maybe creepy biker-demons on their way.

Three, he was approximately thirty-percent naked already, half-risen from the bed; and sheet or no sheet it was pretty much not of the okay. Her mind was kind of babbling about it, even though that was kind of ridiculous, since she had essentially helped him, naked, out of the tub a little while back, and into a towel, and…

And anyway, he shouldn’t be leaving a bed to approach her in a sheet. He just shouldn’t. And also all the other reasons. “Don’t be stupid!” she snapped, halting him mid-motion.

His eyes narrowed again, settling on a glare. He opened his mouth to fight with her about it, and really, why was he trying to act all gentlemanly anyway? Spike was anything but a damn gentleman, so why were they even  _ having _ this conversation? “No, shut up. One, I’m not going to sleep no matter what, so there’s no point in me going over there. You just screwed up my mind with a bunch of stuff that I’m going to spend the rest of the night trying not to think about; not to mention there’s the whole ‘probably going to be invaded by demon-bikers any second’ thing, and the broken lock on the door—like that even matters—and do you think I ever sleep much anyway, between school and homework and slaying?”

He had the grace to look mildly ashamed. “All the same, Slayer, you ought to get at least some sodding rest. For one, they’re  _ my _ enemies, not yours…”

He was kind of pissing her off now. “Look. I’m not trying to be a jerk about this, but let’s be real. You’re clearly beat…”

Defensive ire wiped away any shame in his expression. “I’m sodding fine, dammit!” 

Despite his assertion, he sounded really super tired, and he actually looked… haggard, for a vampire. Too pale, and just basically exhausted. It made her wonder if maybe he too was afraid to be anything less than fully awake in case more of those biker demons showed up. 

Well, anyway, it wasn’t all on him. Not anymore. Buffy managed a tight shrug. “We both know you’re not, okay. And we both know if someone’s going to be taking the chair tonight it needs to be me…” His glare turned gelid, but she had zero time to be delicate anymore. She needed him to stay over there, get him and his sheet back on the bed and stop him trying to wander around. He might hurt himself or something. “If I end up falling out you can wake me up if we get attacked, but I killed one of their guys too, and I helped you kill the other one; and it sounds like they’re not the forgiving type. Pretty sure they’re not gonna be fans of me now, either.”

Somehow something she had said must have disarmed him. His lips actually twitched, and he very slowly subsided back onto the mattress; first one knee, then the other, then with a faint hint of a shrug, he settled back down on his side, facing her. “Well, something tells me they bit off more than they could chew when they set foot in your town, Slayer. Probably should’ve stayed away like they were doin’. You’re a sodding formidable, take-no-prisoners sort of bird.”

She really shouldn’t feel that surge of pride in his absolute confidence in her ability to defend her turf, however misguided she might have been in the past over some… Slayer-demon interactions. But, okay, she kind of was proud. He was just so…

Okay, the thing was, chipped or no, Spike was a dang Master vampire. An honest to god, full-on, had lived for a century or two and through two fights with Slayers, Master vampire. And he thought she had the upper hand. That was kind of…

/Dammit, Buffy, why are you getting all blushy because a demon’s complimenting you? Because  _ Spike’s _ complimenting you?/ “We’ll see,” she heard herself say. “We’re probably just lucky they’ve stayed away this long.”

She was answered with a derisive snort. “Pull the other one. You’re the reason they’ve steered clear  _ this _ long.” He rocked back a little on his elbow, watching her again with that weirdly intense gaze. “No one wants to party at even a first-class hellmouth like this with a plucky Slayer like you in town."

/A first-class.../

"You’ve got a hell of a reputation. Not some wet-behind-the-ears chit is gonna bite it easy or turn tail and run when she’s outnumbered. You’ve got the place wired. They don’t want a piece of that.” A slightly different note entered his voice; pensive, distant. “No, Slayer; they’ll no doubt stay gone, and these two idjits were just passing through, got lucky.” His voice went tight, pained as he said it. And turning gingerly away from her, he lay down, flung his forearm over his eyes.

Buffy watched him for a moment in something strangely like shock. She had never thought of herself like that—some kind of famous peace officer in the wild, wild west—like Wyatt Earp or something. (She had seen ‘Tombstone’ as a prepubescent hatchling because Val Kilmer and Kurt Russell, and had been sorely disappointed by the former’s incredibly pale look in the flick, but had really loved all the dresses the women had worn. Who knew she was soon to be surrounded by so many pale guys?) But now that Spike mentioned it, this stupid place really was that insane, wasn’t it? Rowdy ‘cowboys’ taking potshots at her, weird gangs and gang-leaders, corrupt mayors, gambling in the back of the bar, bizarre churches and cults. /Yep. Totally the wild west sometimes. We even have ‘gunfights’ every night at high… midnight—only with swords—and stupid inter-demon wars…/ And the supposed unsuspecting populace, who really knew all of it was going on and wished they were elsewhere, just moving on with their lives and trying to go about their day while they got banged up and broken up and cleaned up again and again, and the bars kept getting smashed… 

And, of course, there were the beleaguered white hats versus black hats. And she so had deputies. /Guess I should go get my shiny badge./ 

Spike was strangely sweet to make it sound like she was some kind of big boogeyman outside of Sunnydale, with her fame spreading far and wide or some crap, but she wasn’t going to depend on her supposed inter-county rep to keep these particular nasties out. Wearing a nonexistent badge and carrying a nonexistent license to protect and serve meant that, whatever Spike said right now, she had to stay awake.

She had a job to do, and she was going to do it.

***

They watched the town for the night. The locals were keeping their heads down, acting scared. Almost… good. Seemed like the rumors were a little off, and the sheriff was actually doing her job after all. Damn shame. Would’ve been fun to go in, spit-roast a few residents, drink the burgh dry, raise some hell. 

Oh well. 

Posting a couple of his more dependable boys on the outskirts in case the bitch went back to Goleta and left them an opening, Razor led the rest of the club over to Carpinteria. There were a few bars they could tear up over there… and it was two towns away from Sunnydale. Way outside the Slayer’s jurisdiction. 

Self-righteous bitch wouldn’t follow them down there. 

* * *

One wonders how long the holding pattern will last, and if it will give our two very vulnerable children time to figure out some things while the world outside beats at their broken, beleaguered doors... *g*


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit soon after the last one, but that one was late, so here it is.
> 
> Sorry, it's a relatively short one. But here's where things start happening. Where I lock these poor kids in a room and, in the absence of as much immediate terror/outside attacks, they're forced to, you know, bond and actually get to know each other.
> 
> I also get the chance to do a thing I love to do, and do most gleefully (especially under current circumstances), and that's subvert a popular trope. I search for chances to do that with tropes, and then set them up all subversively and knock them down like ninepins, because I'm a jerk. So... sorrynotsorry. 
> 
> Your friendly neighborhood antitropist still loves you!!!

Doing her job made for an incredibly long night. 

The chair was uncomfortable as heck, and the room had already smelled bad before the addition of the nasty blood and the unwashed demon corpses slowly warming up along with the rest of the place. These things, and the occasional task of shirt-checking and jeans-rotating kept Buffy in a state of semi-wakefulness for a few hours, as did her rumbling belly. She ignored the latter, since it wasn’t like she hadn’t missed a meal before on some patrol-related incident. Worked on coming up with more of her cover story about the whole biker-chasing thing for Giles and her friends. When even that made her sleepy she rose—more than once—to quietly pace over to the drawn curtains, peep out in hopes of staying awake. Considered stepping out into the cool night for a breath of fresh air but decided against it. Seriously considered dragging the bodies down to the dumpster, more than twice… but the thought of leaving Spike alone even that long sent a jag of panic through her; enough of a shot of adrenaline, actually, to wake her up for a good fifteen minutes each time she pondered that option.

After a while it became her stopgap when she started to pass out.

“I’d say you could take one of the pillows and the blanket, but I doubt any of the floor’s not a bloody mess…”

Buffy sighed and eyed the carpet, which she would never have considered for bed material even before they’d gutted demons all over it. /Bloody is right. And nasty. And probably covered with a whole lot of invisible things I don’t even  _ want _ to think about, under the blood./ “Get some rest.”

“Course, you could come up here, but I know you won’t.”

She stared at the dark hump on the bed, utterly thrown. “Now you’re just trying to pick a fight to keep me awake.”

He snorted. “Bein’ civil. No reason us both bein’ uncomfortable. Think I can keep my mind off your charms, considerin’ the circumstances, long enough for you to get some soddin’ sleep. Your virtue’s safe, Slayer.” His voice held such an incredible gamut of emotion in it that it stunned her; bitterness, caustic pain, sarcasm, fierce belligerence, weariness, and a kind of… almost affectionate-sounding regret that she couldn’t place in any category at all. 

It was the last one that kept her from answering sharply, and the implication in the words that kept her from screaming something dire at him that she could never take back. Instead she just exhaled with equal weariness. “I’m  _ fine _ , Spike. Just go to sleep.”

“Yeah. Sure. Right then.” He bit off the last words with a strange click of teeth and tongue, and fell silent again.

The room returned to that incredibly stultifying state that required superhuman effort to remain conscious. “You mind if I turn the TV on?” Buffy asked finally, in desperation.

_ “Please,” _ the resident vampire half-moaned, sounding equally desperate.

Rising, Buffy strode purposefully for the battered-looking old CRT TV on the peeling veneer dresser, her boots squelching unpleasantly in the drying pools of blood in the carpet. She fumbled for the dial in the dark, flicked the thing on. 

Nothing. “Probably that’s the wrong one, or…” She fumbled for another button, found a few others, pushed and prodded. 

No response. “Ummm…”

Spike groaned audibly. “Maybe it’s not plugged in?”

Leaning over the dresser, Buffy peered into the dark crevice behind it. Frowned. “I’m gonna turn the light on.”

“If the bloody thing’s broken…”

Buffy located the switch on the nearest lamp. The bare bulb exploded into shocking yellow light… and promptly fizzled out, leaving behind a filament-shaped afterimage on her eyeballs.

“Christ, this place is a shitehole.” 

Blinded by the flash of light, Buffy didn’t see him move, was startled by the rustling… and then he was beside her, trailing his sheet to lean over the edge of the dresser. The sense of powerful vampire exploded next to her, setting her entire body humming with a wild, living awareness that made her buzzy as hell, so that she damn near jumped out of her skin. “For God’s sake, Spike, you need a bell!”

“Bloody hell,” he muttered, ignoring her. “The sodding thing’s plugged in. That finishes that.” Shuffling over toward the TV, he fiddled a little with the knobs on the ancient thing, as if she hadn’t done just that a second ago. “Either the switch is broken, or…”

“I already tried that,” she hissed irascibly, still annoyed at his abrupt appearance, and now at his second-guessing. “What, like you can fix it. Are you an electrician in your spare time?”

He straightened to regard her levelly in the gloom. “Could do, maybe, Slayer,” he informed her flatly. “Have had to fix up a few nests on the leavings of society, yeah? You’d be amazed the shite humans toss in the rubbish heap as still work just fine if you fiddle a bit with it; and they bin it like it’s worthless for want of touchin’ a couple wires together.”

Buffy regarded him with startlement. /Huh./ Maybe living on the edge of the human world lent itself to garnering a few useful skills after all, aside from killing people and drinking blood, and, like, stealing people’s stuff. It had never occurred to her that someone like Spike would ever fix anything instead of just ripping it off new from a store, but maybe he liked to keep a low profile sometimes? 

/Also, I guess maybe he has had a whole hundred-and-whatever years of time on his hands to learn stuff./ “Well… you wanna try and fix it?”

Her suggestion was rewarded with a faint, irritable glare. “Not gonna do these sods any favors, Slayer. I’m for bed. I’ll tell myself a nice story instead.” Turning away with a disgusted grunt, he headed back for the mattress. “I remember every book I’ve ever read. Just put myself in mind of a fine one. Say, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, or…”

“Well, that’s great for you,” Buffy muttered sourly. “Some of us can’t remember whole books to stay awake.”

“Might try readin’ one, to start, Slayer.”

Buffy threw his mostly-dry t-shirt at him. It hit him, very satisfyingly, right in his smug face. “Shut up, Spike.”

Chuckling, he lay back down and turned his back to her.

***

Buffy gave in when the sky got light enough that people had started moving around outside on the walkway. She was hazing in and out of a faint doze somewhere in the morning hours when she heard him; the low moans, the mutters, the faint uncomfortable noises that blended at first into her stupor so that she didn’t notice that they were separate from her not-quite-dreams. 

It was the high-pitched shriek of terror that jolted her completely from semi-somnolence to sit up straight, staring.

She had been slumping in the uncomfortable chair, her neck tilted at a rotten angle, and she was seriously stiff. She had to ignore that for a sec—that, and the incredibly icky smell she had located in the part of the chair where she had had her head in her hand—because right now, Spike was kind of the priority. “What are you…”

She was answered with a sort of fitful tossing, and an outflung arm. Another low, warbling whistle of a sound that was not quite a yell, which pitched up abruptly into a shout. “No!”

/Oh. Crap./ It was clear that he was having a nightmare. And it was just as clear what he was dreaming about. 

/God./ Buffy hadn’t even known that soulless (unsouled? un-human-souled?) vampires  _ could _ dream. Based off of how still he had been over there—not even breathing noises--she had thought they were like, dead when they slept, but clearly…

She hadn’t realized she was moving until she was there, staring down at him over the bed with one hand held out. Her leg was asleep, waking up all pins and needles where she’d sat with it crossed, and her hand was still all cramped at the wrist from laying on it for too long, but her discomfort was forgotten for the moment, the way he was rustling around; jerky, like he was trying to escape from his body. 

He was still turned away from her, but he was… 

God, he was so tense. It was easy to see, despite the fact that he had put the black t-shirt back on somewhere in there. It didn’t do much right now to obscure the awful rigor of his shoulders, the corded tension of his arms, the way his fists were clenched, quaking, and…

In spite of herself, she reached out to touch him, to interrupt the awful memories ripping at his mind. But at the last moment she hesitated. For one, what if he thought she was… one of them, trapped in the dream as he was? And for another, what if he didn’t want anyone touching him right now? /Especially  _ me _ ./

It just felt weird, touching him without his permission. Without him being awake to know she was doing it. 

It was one thing if they were fighting or something. It was completely another if he was all unconscious and vulnerable. 

And then he rolled a little, and she saw his face. 

His eyes were tight shut, his dark lashes a fan across deep-set eyes red-rimmed, the hollows like the bruised insides of plums. His skin was insanely pale, and so very drawn that he looked like he was carven from porcelain. Everything in him was tense, clenched. His teeth were bared, and she found herself mesmerized to see him ripple, bone-crunchingly, from human guise to game face and back again, over and over… and oh god. His fangs had scored his lower lip bloody in deep trenches. The gashes were like unconscious retreads of the bite-marks from yesterday; a painful wound reopened, only this time much, much worse. 

The game face should have repulsed her, should have made her turn away… but strangely it didn’t. Somehow… it made her realize something. /A demon… can be traumatized. And… maybe it’s not a human ‘guise’. Maybe there’s… still some of that man left in you if…/

As if in answer to her thoughts, he shifted back, rippling to his human face… and she thought she saw a glimmer of something that might have been tears under his lashes. 

It tore into her heart, and without thought, she laid one hand on his shoulder.

His response was instantaneous and explosive. 

He scrambled away so fast she almost missed it; damn near fell off the other side of the bed, where the corpses were. His eyes, open on hers, were mazed and unaware as he flung off her hand in an automatic blocking move that had all the power of terror behind it. “Get the fuck off me!” he bellowed, shocking her.

She jumped again when, behind her, some loud, angry person banged harshly on the thin wall they shared with the next room. “Hey, shut up over there! People are tryna sleep!” 

The shout seemed to bring Spike all the way back to himself. He blinked a little, blue eyes resolving from the incipient amber and coming back from muzzy and confused to incisive. He shook his head, rubbed his hand briefly through his insane riot of curls, swiftly cased the room with a quick gaze. Came back around to eye her dazedly. “What the fuck, Slayer?”

She really had no idea what to say, so she said the only thing she could think of. “Rise and shine?”

His gaze circled around her body to find the curtained window. He squinted at it, back at her, obviously at a loss. “It’s only maybe sodding nine…”

Buffy nodded. “Uh, yeah, and…” Frowning, she realized that she had to pee like woah and, after that, probably that she if she didn’t eat soon she was going to kill someone. “We should talk logistics. In a minute.” Turning away from him, she made for the bathroom and left him to wonder just what the hell had happened. 

/I’m sure not going to explain it to him. Let him figure it out for himself./ At this point she was pretty sure his pride could only handle so many more blows, at least when it came to facing her down.

Upon exiting the bathroom, still mourning her mossy mouth, Buffy headed straight for the radiator and his pants. The room was way warm now, despite the blocked heating unit and the seriously overworked and aging device, and the corpses were starting to get redolent. And, no doubt housekeeping would be arriving to kick them out soon, and would wonder just who the heck they were, being as how non-paying boarders probably didn’t usually kill the paying ones to get the room. /Assuming these idiots paid, which I guess is assuming a lot./ “I figure we have till… maybe eleven to get out of here,” she informed her reluctant vampire companion as she felt around the still-damp denim. “Here. They’re not super dry or anything, but they’re not, you know, sopping wet anymore. I guess they’ll have to do…” She tossed the jeans over. “Your stuff from the pockets is on the bathroom counter. Anyway, I tried to come up with a story last night while I was pretending to stay awake…”

Catching the damp jeans, Spike shot her a sardonically amused look. But his eyes, when she forced herself to meet them, were directed down at his pants, and he was fingering them with a strange, illegible expression on his face, as if he was trying to find something he’d lost, or was confused about something. “Spike?”

He shook his head and waved one hand, as if inviting her to continue. 

“Well, I figure… and feel free to chip in anytime,” she went on a little dryly, “what happened was, those bastards came around the corner, you saw them and told me they were bad news, so we chased ‘em down, took ‘em out. But while we were fighting them, one of ‘em said something about how the rest of the gang was nearby, so we went to go check it out, got into it with them over in…” She shrugged. “Wherever. What’s a good town, close by but not something that would get into Sunnydale news? Like, Capitan, or Solvang, or Santa Ynez, or…”

He was just staring at her now. It was unnerving. “What? Stop it, you’re weirding me out. Doesn’t it sound good? I mean, you could drive, right? You have a car around here somewhere. I’ve seen that old heap…”

“Now listen.” His odd expression vanished, and he leveled a finger at her. “Lay off the bloody car, Slayer. That’s a bleedin’ classic, it is!” He shook his head, kind of like a dog shaking water off of his fur. “Yeah, it sounds fine. All except for the part where we’re suddenly demon-fighting partners in crime. What makes you think your mates will buy us being bosom-buddies all of a sudden; especially once they find out I can hit again?”

She was arrested by that, frowned. Since when did  _ she _ believe it? It had all sounded so pat in her head. “Oh. Uh… Well, you have the knowhow, you know how these guys work, you want to, um… get on my good side…”

His lips twitched. “Sure. Yeah. Did it all for the smokes and blood.” 

His deadpan was clearly mocking. She ignored the tone to reply brightly, grinning all sunny at him. “Right. So maybe we don’t tell them right away that you can hit?” /Great, now you’re gonna lie to the Scoobies about Spike?/ 

The glint in his eye was first startled, amazed… and then assessing, and okay, time to falter. “Or, we just… gloss over all of that. Whatever. You have the knowhow either way. And I didn’t, um, tie you up because you were being so helpful.” With the way he was smirking at her it all sounded super thin, and all the sudden she was wondering why she thought anyone would buy it, and what she was thinking, and… /Just what the hell is  _ wrong _ with you, Buffy? Thinking they’ll believe a word of this… And jeez! Getting ready to lie to your friends by omission, for  _ Spike _ …/ 

Clearly Spike was falling through all the same holes in the story as she was, judging by the narrow eyes and the piercing glare. “And then, what? We just stayed up the coast a ways because we were tired? Got a room for the night?” He dropped the jeans and leaned back a little, a faint smirk now touching his lips. “First thing your mate Xander’s gonna do is demand Red take the sodding spell off of you, because for sure it didn’t take when she removed it the last bloody time, and obviously you think you’re still gone on me…” He had a strange twist to his lips as he said it.

Stunned, she gaped at him. “You’re nuts!”

“And ol’ Rupert’s gonna wanna have you off to hospital to get your head examined, and me back in chains for puttin’ some kind of vampiric whammy on his Slayer…”

Buffy closed her mouth and just stared, briefly sidelined. “Wh… Is that even a thing?”

He leaned forward again, arms on his knees, and eyed her intently. “Why you askin’, pet?”

Unaccountably, she blushed, and looked away. “Well, you come up with a story, then,” she snapped, feeling abruptly pissed off. “I’m just trying to keep you out of that damn bathtub, because no way am I gonna let them tie you back up on top of… everything, and it’s not like I wanna just waltz out of here and tell everyone what  _ actually _ happened, because no matter what you’ve done in your life you don’t deserve to have everyone…  _ know _ that, and…” 

Spike’s eyes had drifted away again, to look everywhere but her. But at this last he lifted his head. Once more she found herself the recipient of a very strange azure gaze that seemed to delve directly into her soul; like he was looking for something. “Why you doin’ this, Slayer?”

/Why am I? Lying, and…/ She bit her lip, shook her head. Directed her gaze to somewhere off over perhaps his left shoulder. /Maybe it won’t come to that. Maybe…/ “Because… it’s the right thing to do.”

His next words jerked her head back as if he had shot her in the heart. “Bit of tech they put in my head doesn’t work anymore. Should’ve just staked me when you found that out. Instead…” He glanced down again, picked at the seam of the jeans he held cradled in his lap. “You’re here washin’ blood out of m’ togs, an’ rackin’ your pretty head to come up with stories about the time has passed, helpin’ me avoid your mates…” His eyes rose to meet hers then, burning. “And I sodding well want to know why is all.”

Buffy felt something curl in her stomach; something that felt like dread, and uncertainty, and confusion… and her mind hit a brick wall of unwillingness, because dammit; she had been very successfully not thinking about that wrinkle at all so far, and she very much did not want to think about it right now. Because the fact of the matter was, yesterday Spike had done violence very efficiently, unto death, and with exactly zero ill-effect to himself when he had knocked off that demon. Not that she wasn’t glad, and not that she blamed him in the slightest, but…

Well, the implications would change everything, and she really just didn’t want to have to consider any of them. Not right now. When it came to Spike, at least in this moment, she just very suddenly… didn’t want to. Which was an incredibly dangerous and exceedingly slippery slope she had been down before, humanizing soulless vampires, and she was supposed to be on guard against this, was supposed to remember always and forever that they were monsters; evil, disgusting monsters deserving of no compassion or pity or staying of the hand or…

/He cried in his sleep. No one cries crocodile tears in their sleep./

She knew what the others would think. Knew what they would say if they knew that she had hesitated for even an instant after knowing the chip didn’t work anymore; especially considering her history… but right now she just… couldn’t face the question of it. Not after what he had been through. Not after what she had seen in him in the last few hours. 

It would be kicking someone who was down. Who was vulnerable, and had put himself in her hands. 

Someone who had shown her the last vestiges of his humanity and then lain naked in her care, in every way. 

Even if Giles was right and it was all a show the demon put on to lure prey and play games, she just… couldn’t do it. Besides; right now there was no reason for it, and just really, really didn’t seem like a game or a trick. Not even a little bit. 

It was more like Spike was looking at her like he was expecting her to play a trick on  _ him _ . Like he was wondering if she was playing some kind of game with his… Well, his heart, which was a hard thing to think of him having, but he clearly did, with the whole… All of  _ this _ , and the Drusilla thing, and…

And she simply could not stake him in it. Not right now. Not when he… /Not when you can’t even fight, or stand on your own two feet in front of me and defend yourself, or…/ 

Her brain shut down for a moment, because all of that implied a ‘later’ she could not in this moment comprehend. Not from inside the now she currently occupied, with him. “I’ll deal with that later,” she told him quietly, and turned away. “Right now, we need to figure out what to do with the next couple of hours.”

A short, profound silence filled the room. Spike broke it with tones filled with a strange, curious-sounding respect. “That’s what I like about you, Slayer. You make it up as you go, but you do it with authority. And somehow you always seem to pull it out.” She thought she heard a faint grin in his voice then. “‘Minds me of me.”

She scoffed mockingly at him as she headed over to the window to twitch aside the curtain and peer out. It would give him a chance to head into the bathroom behind her and preserve his dignity, get dressed in something like peace. “You’ve never managed to finish like even one plot yet. At least, not around here.”

“Well,” he muttered as he passed, “the first two are on the money. Problem is, you’re better at the execution part, so you get me before I can finish my follow-through.” Weirdly, he sounded almost… good-natured about it. Almost amused, actually, and maybe even a little admiring. Even… fond? Which was bizarre, and frankly a little worrying.

God, he was a strange vampire.

***

Carpinteria was a bust. They’d done all the damage they could in that one-horse shithole. Razor was about to call in the troops and head out again—maybe they could find some fun back in Mussel Shoals—when Craw came roaring in on his mule. “Shit, son; your hawg needs a tune-up.” Thing was missing. 

“Know it, boss.”

“Why the fuck did you leave Montecito?” Razor took a swig of his highball of white lightning. “Thought I told you to stay put with Beater. Well, that’s fine. Go back and get him. We’re heading out…”

“That’s why I came back, boss. Beater’s still there. Rumor has it… you were right. The bitch isn’t in town much, mostly hunts around the college.” Craw leaned in a little closer, the skinny, bird-like gullet he had wobbling as he swallowed hungrily. “In fact, no one’s seen her hunting in Sunnydale in two  _ nights _ .”

Razor slowly lowered his bottle, pondered the radio silence from his two missing boys. “Then where the fuck are our guys?”

“Dunno, boss.”

“And why the fuck is everyone in that town so fucking well-behaved? They’re acting scared as hell!”

Craw shrugged again. He was dumb as a post, clearly didn’t give a rat’s ass. “Dunno boss.”

Had to love a dickhead like this, just did what he was told. He was useful enough.

Standing up off his stool, Razor threw down the mostly-empty jar. It shattered behind him against the denuded bar.  _ “BOYS,” _ he roared.

All around him in the wreckage of what had once been a going concern of a saloon and was now a wasteland of murder and mayhem, his boys promptly looked up from their various pursuits. There were a few whimpers from whichever of the locals were still alive to tell the tale. The smell of fear and stale blood, sweat and fucking filled the air, but all the fun that could be had had been had in here. “Lend me your ears.”

Every Hellion in the place did so. They knew better than not to. “Craw here tells me the Slayer’s MIA back at the hellmouth. Thinkin’ that means maybe we should ride.”

Chuckles started, grew till they resonated around the room. His boys began to rise, one by one, from their various amusements. Clothes were adjusted, bottles were grabbed up. Razor tilted his head a little at Craw. “Lead the way, son.”

Craw grinned broadly around his metal implants. “You got it, boss.”

* * *  
  
  
  
Can't shake a bad penny.  
GAWD, i can't wait for the next chapter, tho. That one has me bouncing on my heels. BOUNCING.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Longer AN than usual.  
This chapter is specifically dedicated to Ginger, because at some point I just absolutely couldn’t get this thing off the ground. I knew everything about how the story was gonna go, knew every detail… but when it came to actually writing it, the thought of putting myself through it was painful. I was stalled at a motel room door and I just couldn't. For one thing, opening that door was gonna hurt, and also I’ve spent months getting Spuffy healthy and happy in another series, so I couldn’t seem to convince my brain to go back in time to a period in which they really weren’t. And then Ginger just showed up one day in a Spuffy group, all, ‘Hey, anybody realize that Lana Del Rey basically wrote the Spuffy hymnal?’ (paraphrasis mine), and boom. That was what made this story start moving again! 
> 
> So... if anyone needs to know, **the specific song for this entire thing is called "F*ck It, I Love You" by Lana Del Rey**, because Spike said so. It was my carrot to get past that doorway and to the good stuff, like this chapter. Writing BuffyPOV hurts my brain (SpikePOV is like breathing, but this fic didn’t allow for that); thus I have to find my way into a BuffyPOV fic by knowing what’s going on for Spike and sort of crawling my way into Buffy’s head via her guy. We all know he’s her psychologist; as long as he can read her, so can I. I have to figure out what Spike’s going through and use it as an engine. If I can figure how Spike is reacting to her, I can read what she’s up to. The above-mentioned song became that engine from Ch.7 all the way through about Ch.14, so thank goodness for chance moments from other fans!!!

“Like your hair better like that, pet. That crimped thing is right out.”

Buffy shot a glare toward the trailing vamp. “You’re heading swiftly back toward irritating, Spike. What’s wrong with my hairstyle?” Her hand fled to her crown, where yesterday’s carefully-wrought poofiness had, to be fair, deflated significantly during their dreary night’s motel campout. 

“Just not your best one is all.” He shot her a faintly teasing grin. “And you say I’m stuck in the sodding eighties.” One pale hand rose from the shadows of the motel’s overhang as if to reach for her bangs, then dropped away when she backed off slightly in surprise, edging a little further into the light that was the demarcation between them. “You’ve got shampoo-commercial hair, Slayer. Shines all sleek in the sun. Why mess with perfection?”

He was saying it all diffidently, but it was clear that he was complimenting her on her hair, and were they in the twilight zone? “Did  _ you _ fall back under the spell?” she demanded, incredulous.

He straightened abruptly. “Never mind that I said anything. You’ve got stupid hair, alright? Happy?”

Buffy found herself frowning. Talk about a one-eighty. “Okay, you don’t have to be insulting.”

“Just forget about it.”

Buffy opened her mouth to respond, either in demand for further notes on his bizarre, mercurial character traits so she could at least keep up, or to tell him to knock it off with the hot and cold thing so she could focus, but before she could do either, she jumped. 

Her hip had buzzed.

Frowning, she dug into her pocket, found her aging pager. Pulled it out and glanced at it. /Wil. Probably wondering where the heck I am./

“Starting to fret, are they?”

Shoving the device back into her pocket, Buffy considered telling just Wil that she was okay. And, maybe her mom. Not with a whole ton of details or anything, but, yeah. Just a quick side-note. ‘Don’t worry. I’m fine. There’s just… stuff. Be back… when I can…’ /Yeah, that’ll go over big. They so won’t worry more when I say that, and neither of them will go straight to Giles. No locator spells from Wil, no siree./

Her eyes drifted back toward the open doorway behind them, and the phone lying useless in there. Because actually, calling Wil might be the only thing that might keep them from using the whole locating thinger if she stayed incommunicado for too much longer, which…

She caught Spike watching her stare at the phone. And she saw how tense he had gone, the way his taut form seemed to have turned to stone, limned faintly in edges of morning light from where he stood in the shadows of the building. 

With a sigh, Buffy turned resolutely back toward the courtyard. “At some point Wil’s gonna do a spell.”

He grunted, but didn’t answer.

“If I call her, say something, maybe she…”

Her hip buzzed again. 

“Okay, what even…” She checked the pager for a second time. /Giles./ Just wow. They were all going after her now. “Let’s change that from ‘at some point’ to ‘any minute now’.” 

“Watcher in on it now?”

“Yeah, and…” And she was actually starting to get kind of annoyed. It was that old annoyance, the one that she always tried to stuff down; the one that said, ‘Look, I’m the Slayer, and I’m even an adult now, I can take care of myself, I don’t need to check in every second! I’ll let you know what’s going on when I need to, but till then, deal!’ She swiftly tempered the annoyance with a firm reminder-to-self to chill; that these were her friends, that they loved her, that they were just worried about her…

Her hip buzzed again. The surge of irritation mounted, making her roil with a mixture of dread and anxiety and the mild nausea of shame, because it was Xander this time, and why were they ganging up on her? It wasn’t like they could know she was with Spike, so they had no reason to… To be concerned. 

The Xander part made it worse, made her feel like she was totally doing something wrong right now, something terribly illicit by helping Spike. A Spike whose chip was acting all wonky and letting him be violent again, when they were only supposed to be keeping him around because he had the 411 on those commando guys; and while she had him here, shouldn’t she be using the captive audience thing to pry those deets out of him instead of being all soft and cuddly with the killer vamp, and…

/And, look; if I didn’t call one of you back, I’m not able to come to the phone right now, okay? So chill, and I’ll get back to you when I can! Stop blowing me up! Seriously! It’s all the same pager, what  _ even? _ /

When Wil beeped her again she almost threw the device off the railing onto the stained, heat-buckled sidewalk below. She experienced a brief but very satisfying hallucination of what it would be like to see it shattering to bits on the cracked and flaking concrete down there. Felt Spike’s eyes on the back of her neck, wanted to lash out at him for the knowing look there, and instead forced her fingers to open before they could crush the innocuous device. 

Drawing in a deep breath, Buffy did something she could not remember ever having done since Giles had first given her the beeper. She turned it firmly off. “I think,” she heard herself whisper, “we should maybe stay another night. Do you have any money?”

***

They were going through their pooled cash (a bare seventy bucks between them, mostly Spike’s ill-gotten gains, since the commandos hadn’t bothered to rifle through his belongings. Or maybe he’d stolen someone’s wallet after he’d escaped; he wasn’t telling. She had all of twelve dollars to contribute, having spent most of her riches on lunch yesterday at the Student Union) when Buffy realized belatedly that Wil was actually heading into Psych class at this very moment, and was probably totally freaking out right now wondering where she was. It explained the multitude of pages, made her feel a little better about the harassment. To Wil, missing class was like missing breathing or something. It wouldn’t occur to her that for Buffy it was more along the lines of a cross between a duty and a dessert, depending on the day and the subject matter. 

Psych, unfortunately, fit into the latter category, which sucked. “Oh crap… I’m missing Psych. That's of the lame. Also, I’m so gonna get docked…”

Spike, for a wonder, didn’t mock her. His eyes, rising to hers over his second recount of the cash, looked mildly interested. “Psychology, is it? Wouldn’t’ve figured you for tryin’ to figure out the workings of folks’ minds an’ that.” He smirked slightly then. “Reckoned you more for a kill first, think later sort of bird.” 

And apparently the mocking was just a late gear in his brain. 

“Hey! It’s interesting!” She found herself avoiding his eyes for some reason. “It’s kind of nice to realize why I do… some of the things I do.”

“I reckon it is.”

He didn’t have to sound so snide. “Shut up, Spike.” She shook her head anxiously. “I’m gonna miss English Comp too. No way I’ll make it all the way to campus in time to get to it even if I felt okay leaving you. It takes like three buses to get out there…”

He inexplicably froze. “You’re takin’ a Composition class?”

Buffy regarded him for a sec, surprised at his tone. “Well, they said we had to take a writing class,” she answered defensively. /Why am I feeling defensive?/ “And it also covered the English requirement. There’s a ton of reading in it, which sucks because there’s also a crapload of reading in Psych, and in Anth 101. Though, those are super interesting. Not that the readings aren’t cool or anything in Comp, it’s just that by the time I get to ‘em my brain’s exhausted, and I don’t get anything out of reading some guy’s biography or whatever poetic language they’re trying to use to…”

“What else is on your schedule?” 

Wow. Was Spike actually interested in her school life? “What do you care?”

The weird note of fascination died abruptly from his voice, and the bizarre light in his eyes shut down like it had never been. “Never mind. Forget I asked.”

Okay, now she felt guilty for snapping at him. It was just… why was he so interested in her life? It was so random! “This really forgettable freshman seminar,” she heard herself telling him, probably just to keep the peace; though why she felt so compelled to preserve said peace with the irritating vamp was beyond her right now. “I had to pick the only one that still had a spot open. I mean, I lucked out getting the elective I got, the same Anth 101 Wil was in. I slid in there as a waitlist kid; but the seminar I got is, like, ‘Environmental Peril and the Aquifer’. All we do is talk about how California is a desert and we’re just playing chicken with death. Like I can do anything about it…”

“Got a point, though.”

“You’re cheerful.”

Spike shrugged. “Damn near every great civilization throughout history was stupid enough to build up in a desert. Most like because other places where there’s plenty of resources, folks don’t need to organize so bloody much, an’ they don’t get so sodding hierarchical or start building monuments to the rain gods, gettin’ priests and kings to run things and lord it over everyone to control the minimal shite everyone has to share. You look at the people who live in the rain forest. Every one of those happy buggers lives in some kind of sodding commune, naked as jays and not a care in the bloody world. Share soddin’ everything. Don’t overpopulate either, do they? Oi! Mind if I bum a smoke?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure.” A passing man, a hulking Latino-looking dude with gigantic shoulders and a potbelly, unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth, pulled out the pack he’d been resetting in a breast-pocket, tugged out two. “Here.” He frowned. "Take two, man; you look like you need ‘em. Hell.” 

“You’re a bloody lifesaver. Cheers.”

Buffy stared at this insanely simple, incredibly human interaction between the hungry vampire and the Happy Meal wandering by unharmed, then turned back to watch Spike light up one of the two gift cigarettes like he’d been dying to do it for hours. He inhaled blissfully, eyes fluttering closed. Shut down completely for a second, not breathing, going still as a statue, then exhaled exceedingly slowly. “Bloody hell, I needed that,” he whispered. “Christ.” His eyes popped back open then to meet Buffy’s, and to her amazement he picked right back up in his discourse as if he had never left off. “But you get out here in the bleedin’ desert,” he informed Buffy intently, waving his cigarette-laden left hand around him to indict all of California with his charges, “and people always end up buildin’ cities, exceedin’ the resources, and the whole buggerin’ thing collapses.” He dropped his hand and shrugged, smoke drifting from his nostrils. “Always happens. Greed gets ‘em, every time.”

Sometimes Buffy was sure she had no idea who this guy was. “Wow,” she replied after a short pause, and waved her hand in front of her face to waft the smoke away. “Who knew. William the Bloody; big thinker. Maybe you should be a guest-lecturer.”

She was only joking. Total sarcasm moment, but to her surprise Spike turned a little away from her, his voice abruptly rough. “Let’s get on, if we’re gonna, Slayer. Thought you said you wanted to find out how much was another night in this rubbish heap?” His face twisted, though she could only see it in profile. “And we need to get you some take-away. You sound like a soddin’ freight train. Can only stand to hear you rumblin’ like that for another hour, tops, ‘fore I go out and nick you summat.”

Okay, he had her there. She was completely starving. But also, why was he acting so totally off the hinges? 

He stubbed out his cigarette half-smoked, folded the two prized items in his hands as if he were saving them for later, and they headed around the inside of the courtyard toward the sheltered inner stair and the rental office. As they reached the head of the stairway, Buffy felt oddly compelled to break the silence once more. She really, really wasn’t sure why she was so intent on keeping the lines of communication open with a vamp she would have preferred stay totally silent twenty-four hours ago, but at the moment she randomly wanted to keep him talking. 

Probably it had something to do with, like, instinctively taking a sort of continuous temperature of his mental state or something. “I kind of feel bad, leaving those bodies in there for housekeeping to deal with, but I don’t want you to hurt yourself helping me drag them to the dumpster…” Not to mention they’d probably wonder about all those spots of blood on the bed she had so tried not to see. Hopefully they would assume some girl had just stayed in there who had counted the days wrong. Hopefully it wasn’t something they saw a lot. Hopefully…

Her brain shut down before she could complete that thought. /The room is basically a loss anyway. Maybe they’ll burn everything./ “…But I’m sure the heck not gonna leave you behind while I do it, and if you followed me you’d probably try to help…”

“Speak for yourself, Slayer.”

/Now, there’s the Spike we all know and barely tolerate./ “And we’ve lost the cover of darkness,” she pushed on grimly, somehow bizarrely reassured by the return of the taciturn snark of a vamp ready to admit he would as soon follow behind her and watch her do all the dirty work in a situation like that while he smirked away in silence, than help her in any way. “Even people in  _ this _ town would probably call the cops if they saw us lugging bodies out there.” She shrugged it off. “Anyway, they’re probably used to this kind of thing in this place, and it’s not like our names are on the invoice, so…”

“Your fingerprints are all over the sodding room,” Spike pointed out equably enough.

/Well… that’s heartening./ “Okay, but who’s gonna prosecute that?” she shot back. “And anyway, my fingerprints are all over every third ‘crime scene’ in this town, but since most of ‘em are demons…”

“Figured you mostly cleaned up after yourself.”

Buffy sighed wearily. “I do. But I’m usually too tired afterward to wipe the place down.” Actually, she had never even thought of it before. /Leave it to a career criminal to think of something like that./ “Why, do  _ you?” _

“Whatever database I’m in, it’s not under any name that means me.” Spike shrugged. “‘S not like they have my birth certificate and social, yeah? Nor yet my DNA on file, since I’m sodding undead, an’ was born before they started keepin’ records. Might have a few grainy pictures of the back of m’ head, but they’ll have been dated to a time when they’ll pass it off as my father or summat, since no way I’m the same bloke, lookin’ this young. No reason to bother.”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “Vampires,” she muttered, but it was mostly good-natured. Robbery and similar mischief was pretty low on her list of concerns, really, when you got down to it. And, well… the murders were… really not something ye standard police were able to grasp as something they could pin on a demon, so… 

/That’s why  _ I’m _ here./ 

Her mind shuddered away from that thought for the moment. Danced away from any thoughts of her duty and how steadfastly she was  _ not _ doing it,  _ la la la _ … There traveled all the things that went bump inside her own head; things with which she could not, at this particular moment, remotely deal and survive their current circumstance. Too much inside the small space, colliding at cross-purposes.

It hurt.

_ Clunk, clunk, clunk _ , down the pebble-textured steps, around the shady corner, past the limp palmetto. Creaky glass door with a small, almost soundless bell, and into the main office.  _ Tap, tap _ on the security glass. “Hello?”

Nothing. No one. “Um, hello?”

A door cracked in the key-lined wall behind the cubicle. “Yeah?”

/Okay?/ “Um, we wanna rent a room.”

“Check-in is one PM. It’s only ten.”

/This guy’s friendly./ “Great; we want to rent one at one, then.”

“How long?”

“How…” /What?/

To Buffy’s surprise, Spike broke in with a low growl. “One room, all night. Two beds, if you’ve got one and we can afford it. Got all that?”

The clerk, a saturnine guy with frown-lines all over his face, thinning dark hair receding back from his forehead in a sort of greasy W-shape, and a pockmarked complexion, darted small, faded grayish eyes from one to the other of them. His expression went from sour to slightly surprised. “Twins are forty-five a night, but I’m all out.” He shrugged. “Got a couple doubles for forty, a queen for forty-eight.”

Spike grunted and turned to Buffy. “‘S up to you, yeah? Six of one, half-dozen of the other. Take shifts, or get cozy, in which case maybe the queen…”

Buffy sighed and wondered how dirty the floors could be, really. 

At least there would be enough left for food. “It doesn’t matter, right? Might as well stick to the double…”

“Upper floor,” Spike put in swiftly, opening his wallet.

“Oh. Yeah.” It would narrow the approaches. When Buffy thought of all the things that could have gotten at Faith down here on the ground floor of this place, through the bathroom window or…

“Only queens left on the second floor.”

“Bloody hell.” 

They didn’t need to discuss it. Neither of them would feel safe on the ground floor. Spike started peeling out bills, slapped down two twenties and a ten. 

“Deposit’s twenty.”

Buffy closed her eyes and started to shake. She hadn’t even thought of a deposit on top of the rental, and she was so,  _ so _ hungry, and they had been going to get food after this. Now this guy was going to take all the food money, and she was seeing her breakfast/lunch/dinner flash before her eyes… 

“Listen, you sod. We’re not gonna break anything. We’re just gonna crash for a night. The lady needs to eat.”

Buffy stared at Spike, torn from the haze of her own shaky misery by his unexpected and abrupt, snarling rage. 

“Not my problem,” the clerk replied blandly, snatching the cash from Spike’s hand. “You want a room here, you pay the deposit and consider yourselves lucky. Do you have any idea how high the overhead in this place is? How hard it is to stay afloat? We fix crap every night! You’re lucky the deposit isn’t  _ fifty! _ You don’t trash the place, you get it back tomorrow; and anyway, you don’t look like you’re so trustworthy. Look sick.” He glared down into his register, banged it open. “I don’t care if you’re using, but if you plan on shooting up in my rooms with your whore, I might just charge a bigger deposit. Maybe forty…”

Buffy stared at the shiny top of the man’s head, feeling sick and on the verge of shocked tears at the horrible assumptions, the disgusting manners, the godawful disregard for her as a person, the general ill-treatment of a customer…

The register banged shut. Rebounded. The clerk turned away without looking, moving in a manner that was clearly habitual to reach for a set of keys. And Spike’s arm shot out, slithered through the tiny divot in the counter and glass that had seemed way too small to fit an arm; especially a man-sized one. Buffy watched in a daze as those lithe vampire fingers slid smoothly in through the little hole to intercept the nearby register drawer before it returned from its rebound to snick shut, caught it where it lay slightly ajar, having failed to close. Maybe it was old and worn out. Maybe it just hadn’t clicked shut all the way due to repeated rough handling. 

In fact, somehow her brain-to-mouth gear simply failed to engage, even as his forefinger and index caught that last twenty, the deposit, between them, tugged it right back out again. Nudged the drawer shut behind them and folded the bill smoothly into the pocket of his jeans. Just the twenty. He could have taken forty, fifty, a hundred… but he only took the twenty. 

Looking up into his face, numbly wondering, Buffy saw from that strange, distant place again that his expression was dark, full of a glowering rage, and that his eyes were fiercely amber. 

“Here,” the clerk interjected bluntly as he turned back to slap a book and two sets of keys with cheap plastic tags onto the counter. “Room two-twelve’s reserved. Can’t go in till one; they’re still cleaning. Come back to get these then. Meantime, give me some names. I don’t care if they’re real as long as I have something.”

Buffy opened her mouth, though she had no clue what she would have said. Her vampire companion jumped in again, though, all glibly. “The lady’s name is Elizabeth Verana. Mine’s William Porter. And if you ever say another unkind word about her in my hearing again I will  _ end _ you.” Spike’s voice had gone cold, gravelly, and incredibly deadly as he vibrated beside her, on the verge of violence.

Buffy shivered. She had heard him speak like that before; but only once. And only when someone had threatened…

Drusilla. 

It didn’t mean anything of course. It was just… Spike didn’t like… rudeness toward women, maybe? Maybe some sort of holdover from… well, whatever time period he was originally from. 

“Yeah, whatever, man. Come back for the keys at one.”

Spike actually growled. And then his hand fell to Buffy’s arm, and wow. He was actually shaking a little. “C’mon, pet. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

She realized, only then, that he wanted to kill that man. It hit her with even greater impact—sort of like falling off of a building—that he could. The chip in his head was no longer working. Which meant that there was only one reason he  _ wasn’t _ killing that man right now, if that was what he wanted to do.

/It’s because he knows I wouldn’t want him to./

/Like, I get that it’s just a favor, because I’ve been helping him, but…/ Holy crap, that was a lot to put on her. 

Spike was a Master vampire who had been muzzled, and was now free. And he was leashing his every instinct, for her. If someone insulted him, he killed them. 

/Except… the jerk insulted  _ me _ , not Spike, so why…/ 

She had to shake it off. It just made so far beyond zero sense that she couldn’t even. “Where are we…”

He shook his head. “Has to be a payphone about. Order a soddin’ pizza or summat, yeah? Somethin’ you can eat for a couple meals.”

He had good ideas. Good enough that they sort of jumpstarted her brain back into full functioning again, because just the thought of food was… inspiring. Heck; she wouldn’t even make faces at the idea of eating cold pizza twice in a day, since, you know, college student. That was basically a pretty standard description of her food-life right now. “Yeah, good call. I think the Dominos is right down the road…” She hesitated as she started toward the battered payphone she had seen hanging precariously at an angle in the shadows between the office structure and the main building, there on the narrow eyot that housed the ice and vending machines. “Do you, um, want any?” Judging from what she had seen and heard during his short tenure at Giles’ house, he ate a little human food, here and there, because he was weird like that.

He shrugged slightly. “Depends on which sort you get.”

Okay, that was open-ended. “Well, what kind do  _ you _ like?” she asked, whispering a silent prayer to herself as she picked up the much-abused phone-receiver. /Please work, please work, please don’t be dead…/

Another shrug. “Nothin’ with fruit on it. Not too fond of those vegetarian things, all over spinach. Other than that, I’m easy.”

Vampire after her own heart. “Meat-lovers?”

“Woman after my own heart.”

Buffy stared, a little stunned at this parroting of her own thoughts. 

“What?”

Shaking her head swiftly, she turned back to the phone. And what do you know? /Glory, hallelujah, we have a dial-tone!/ Fighting to ignore those immovable sapphire eyes on the back of her neck, Buffy fumbled with the cable to drag up the dangling yellow pages in their hard, scarred cerulean case. They were lucky there was even a pay phone still extant around here, in this day and age of the almighty cell phone; especially in a place like this where it was probably being damaged constantly. Even luckier that there was still a phone book attached. And she was just way too rattled right now; so much so that she almost dropped the stupid heavy thing. 

/Chill, girl. Having compatible pizza preferences doesn’t mean anything, so stop being so amazed at how easily you’re getting along and order something./ Swallowing down the ferocious tiger of a wiggins in her throat, she dug in her jeans for a couple of quarters. “Hey. Do you guys deliver to the Sunnydale Arms?”

***

They encircled the town for a time and merely watched. Waited for the cover of darkness. It wouldn’t do to jump the gun. Best to know for sure what they were getting into. 

Craw and Beater went in to do a little recon, have a couple drinks at the bar. After all, they’d done a decent job the first time around getting the deets.

Unlike the idiots before them, they had strict orders to come back to the fold with intel. No starting any parties on their own. “If those two little bitches ran afoul of the Slayer and got themselves dead, that’s on their own heads. I won’t cry for ‘em. But if we’re gonna go against her, I want you two with me, you get me?”

Beater nodded silently, the way he always did, and squared his heavy shoulders. Wasn’t a big talker, Beater, but he was loyal as fuck.

Craw just grinned nervously. “You got it, boss.”

Craw… Razor could count on him to get the intel out of anyone. People talked to him just to shut him the hell up. And if his flapping fucking tongue got him into too much trouble, Beater would watch his back. They’d be back in a couple of hours with the 411, and then, if there was a hell, they could go in, set up camp. On the best hellmouth around, even. Damn, that’d be nice. 

Razor was itching for it. It had been a fuck of a long time since he’d been here, and it had been too short, then, before that dick of a Mayor had kicked them all to the curb. He could feel the vibe of the place dancing over his hide, even from here; calling him home. Fuck, he wanted it. It made him hard. “Soon, boys,” he promised, low and intent. “Soon, we’re gonna have the party of our lives. Just hold here.”

* * *  
  
  
  
  
*EVEG*  
The chapter might be short, but it is SIGNIFICANT, hehe  
*dances*


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy new year for those who celebrate it now, happy solstice to those of us who just celebrated it, happy whatever else you might be celebrating at the moment... May the coming year be bright.
> 
> Hopefully this chapter will answer a burning question some might have at the moment, as in when the hell are we gonna get poor Spike fed?

She ended up getting a two-for-ten deal; two mediums, that was. Some kind of special, but it came out to more pizza in total than one large, so she was good with that. The phone-order guy sounded a little flipped out about her vagueness when she mentioned not having a room yet, but after the third insistence that she would be waiting by the office to meet them, they agreed to deliver. 

Or maybe they were just not big on coming out to this dive, which wouldn’t surprise Buffy, considering the crazy stuff that probably went down in the place on the regular, and the kind of people who seemed to hang there. /He probably thinks we’re drug addicts just like motel jerk downstairs./

If she didn’t feel kind of numb by this point, she might still be living in nausea-country over that one.

Everything looked better, though, once the food arrived.  Pizza-smell made everything look brighter.

Spike accepted a slice in uncharacteristic silence from where he reclined against the off-white, stucco wall, munched at it while watching her do the same, the flat, oil-soaked boxes balanced on the dusty, paint-flaking railing of the upper floor. Passersby occasionally wended between them. The slowly-warming air of eleven-thirty in California in December was a cool relief after what had seemed an endless summer. Buffy thought it might even rain, eventually. 

It would do the place good. That one poor palm tree down there on the edge of the parking lot looked sad as heck. 

God, it was good to eat. She had been so incredibly starving. It was probably gross to watch her wolfing down her food so quickly right now, but she couldn’t even care. She polished off three pieces in like five minutes, considered a fourth even though she knew she was going to have to make this pizza thing last for dinner too; maybe even breakfast tomorrow…

Buffy glanced back at Spike, saw that he had had a couple bites of his own slice as if to be companionable, and that he was watching her eat with something in his eyes that looked like a strange combination of… what? Approval mixed with hunger and irritation and… “Isn’t it good?”

Irritation swamped approbation, and familiar sarcasm fell from his mouth. “Good as any human food ever is to me.” 

It hit her like the second building of the day. /God, I’m stupid./ She had been so easy with him, gotten so relaxed that she had practically forgotten what he was. And look at him; watching her, holding himself so unbelievably still he might as well have been a statue. And right now, he looked like one. He was way too pale, and the red around his eyes was seriously spreading; the discoloration below them looked for sure like bruising now. He looked… delicate. Breakable.

Spike, William the Bloody, slayer of Slayers, looked  _ breakable _ . 

He hadn’t had any blood since yesterday at Giles’ house, and based off of the complaints he’d been making about quantity and quality, what he’d been eating there had probably been just barely catching him up to where he needed to be after all the crap they’d put him through down in that commando place. 

He’d already been at a pretty big deficit, blood-wise, and she knew it now, if she hadn’t consciously then. If she had realized it on some level she hadn’t cared; had probably actually  _ wanted _ to keep him that way as some kind of unconscious preference to keep the dangerous captive weak and thus less dangerous. But that was yesterday. Since then he’d been injured, bleeding… 

/Oh God./ He had to be, like,  _ starving _ by now. 

No wonder he wasn’t healing right. He would need to eat if he was going to, and she was an idiot that she hadn’t thought of it before. Her only excuse was that she was totally not used to providing for the care of a vampire… /Or, okay; I  _ was _ , but I’m just way out of practice./ 

He seemed to be watching the expressions cross her face now with something like dark amusement winning out over the irritation, which… Just,  _ fine _ , but… But his chip wasn’t working anymore, so why didn’t he just go out and bite someone, if he was this hungry? /Like, why didn’t you bite that jerk motel guy when he was being so rude, or…/

It didn’t make any sense that he was just…  _ staying _ up here with her, starving. 

/Heck; why not bite  _ me _ , for that matter?/ He could, now. 

Something in her expression must have betrayed her thoughts to him. He rolled his eyes and scoffed. “Not gonna sodding bite you, Slayer.” 

She was at sea again, and also… randomly kind of offended? Which was dumb as hell, but then her mouth ran away from her before she could even remotely consider things like whether her words were of the good, or whether she should put reins on that runaway horse. “Why not? Don’t I smell good?”

To her shock, he barked out a laugh. And then, out of nowhere, his scowl-y bad mood vanished into something that actually looked like delight. “Smell like a damn treat, you; but I made a bloody promise, didn’t I?” A very strange, inward expression touched his eyes. “Not gonna hurt any of you lot.” 

She frowned at that, confused. Set aside her pizza bone. “Not while you’re under Giles’ roof,” she pointed out the codicil. “But you’re not right now, and…”

He shook his head, eyes steady on hers, and earnest as if he were arguing some complicated point of law. “Still under it while you’re lookin’ after me,” he answered stubbornly. “Any road, it’d be a poor bloody return for how you’re stayin’ an’ that, ‘f I were to come after you all fangy.”

Somehow she was… weirdly disappointed in his lack of discernible vamp-ness. /Why am I feeling let-down?/ It was idiotic; like she missed having a reason to tussle with him or something stupid like that. “Well… that’s hardly evil.”

He casually tossed his half-eaten slice of pizza back into the box, where it landed, for the record, with extreme precision. “Yeah, well. Not feelin’ especially evil at mo’, I reckon.” And then, as if embarrassed by that admission, he looked away truculently.

She had no idea whatsoever what to do with any of this, but she did know one thing. If you didn’t feed a hungry vampire, bad things happened. So. “Well,” she essayed tentatively, “in that case, we’ve got to get you fed.” 

He actually snorted at her, the jerk. “You think?”

“Yeah. But I don’t…” She looked away, feeling on incredibly uneven ground. “I don’t want anyone to know where you are. Where  _ we _ are.”

“Don’t want anyone to know you’re in a motel helpin’ out the evil undead, is it?”

The strange, put-upon note in his voice dragged her eyes back, and she flashed him a glare. “I didn’t think  _ you’d _ want them to know.” 

This time it was his turn to look away. 

“Or, you know, to deal with… people,” she finished, a little more softly this time. Granted, she was ‘people’ too, but he was pretty much stuck with her right now. “But maybe…” She frowned, an idea blooming in her mind, way to kind of kill two of their problem birds all at once. “Willow seriously owes us a favor…”

Another snort of derision. 

“And it would keep her from getting all overzealous and spell-casty if she knew where I was. And I think she’d keep her mouth shut if I asked her to come by, but kind of implied the whole owe-age of favors thing...”

“Never knew you had it in you to be such a soddin’ blackmailer, Slayer. I’m reassessin’ everything I ever thought about you at mo’…”

He didn’t have to sound so stupidly delighted. “Shut up, Spike. I even think, you know, she might not ask too many questions, since she’d probably not  _ want _ to know…”

A wide smirk settled onto the vampire’s pale, peaked face, made his startling eyes sparkle way too much. “You mean, the chit’ll think we’re here because of ripples from her spell, and she’ll like to be so mortified about it she’ll never speak a word…” 

Okay, he was still a pig. “Oh, God, Spike, no! I just meant…”

His smirk widened to a grin that was way too teasing… and who gave him permission to look… boyish? 

Buffy scooped up one of her pizza bones and threw it at him. It ricocheted directly off of the center of his forehead, bounced off the railing next to her hand, careened to the filthy catwalk floor, and plopped right through the rails to sail down to the parking lot below. She ignored its ignominious demise to stick her tongue out at the vamp currently scowling at her and rubbing a spot of marinara off from between his eyebrows. “You are so gross.”

“Yeah, well.” He gave his forehead another quick scrub, glowering at her in mock-irritation. “You didn’t seem to mind all that much when you were stickin’ your tongue down m’ throat.”

“That was so the spell!”

He did that thing with his tongue, of course, to call attention to it. Rolled it, clicked it behind his teeth, and why was she being nice to him again? “Stop that. You’re not as hot as you think you are.” And she so was not feeling a flush of unaccountable heat throughout her entire body, remembering just exactly how  _ warm _ kissing him had made her feel back when… / _ Stop _ it, Buffy. Just, stop.  _ Off _ limits./

Too late, though, with the mouth. Her words had made his head pop right up. His hand dropped to his side, and if possible, his smirk actually widened. “Hot, is it?”

Okay, enough was enough. She punched him, if only lightly in deference to his injured state, on the arm. And regretted it instantly when the impact made him fall back against the wall behind him. He hadn’t been expecting the playful strike, hadn’t been braced, so he careened against the structure behind him full-body. 

She winced when his entire being tightened up. It was obvious he was fighting not to betray evidence of pain, and dammit, they needed to get him some blood, stat. 

Immediately repentant, Buffy shook her head, closed the pizza box. He wouldn’t want her to apologize, but… “You have any quarters? I don’t have enough, but I need to call Willow if we’re gonna do this. She can spring for your meal…”

Spike sighed, dug into his pocket. Came out with his thirty cents in change and dumped it all into her hand. “Soddin’ pig’s blood. Never thought I’d be so bleedin’ friendly with Babe. Thought I’d have to be bug-shaggin’ crazy to ever stoop to animal blood…” He shrugged slightly. “No doubt Red’s too broke to afford the hospital sort. I’ll admit it costs a fair bit more; though must say I never thought it was too dear for the Watcher. Reckoned he was just too high and mighty to treat the vamp…”

Buffy was nonplussed at that. She had stopped that one black-market theft from the back of the ER, but it had never occurred to her that there were vamps who might pay the hospital fair and square for out-of-date human blood. “Oh. Why didn’t you… ask?”

Spike’s eyes glittered as he watched her, and he straightened slightly. “Why didn’t you lot ever offer? You know what we’re supposed to eat.”

/‘Supposed to.’/ Like animal blood was somehow… almost bad for him or something. She processed that for a sec, feeling strangely wrong-footed. “I just… never thought of it. Blood’s blood, you know?”

It was his turn to look amazed. “Oh, hell; of course you lot would think so. Christ; I thought you were doing it to punish me for being what I am!” He rubbed a hand over his rioting curls, looking sort of lost, and truth be told, kind of exasperated. “Bleeding hell; of  _ course _ it’s different; as different as eating different meats, or…” His face twisted. “I could drink sodding dolphin’s blood, no doubt, but it’d be like drinking fish-swill, as all they eat is fish; and you could as easily call that murder, since they’re as intelligent as humans, some say…”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “But it’s not, because they’re a different species than you.”

Spike stared at her as if she were a total idiot.  _ “You’re _ a sodding different species than me, you unbelievable madwoman! All this lot are! It’s not murder, or cannibalism, or whatever you lot tell yourselves, because I’m. Not. Human!”

And there it was. And yet…

There it also was. Because she had never thought about it that way. Not even once. /To him, it’s not doing anything wrong. Like me eating a cow./

/Oh my God; what am I  _ doing? _ / 

And yet… when she looked at him, she couldn’t unsee the person she was getting to know. She couldn’t unsee those tears, or the vulnerable man he hid beneath the swagger; even the damaged demon reliving the nightmares of what he had survived, and… 

And she knew that she would still be calling Willow to help him. That she would be staying. 

***

“Hey, Wil.”

‘Buffy, oh my God, where have you been? We’ve been so worried!’

“So… it’s a super long story, and I’ll tell you…” /The parts I can, anyway…/ “…But only if you promise not to talk to anyone else and come to where I am.”

‘Are you in trouble? What’s going on?’

“Everything’s fine. Wil, please. Just don’t tell Giles or Xander or anyone you heard from me. Come to the Sunnydale Arms…”

‘The… You’re at the  _ motel?’ _

“It’s a seriously long story. Room two-twelve.” The buses and stuff made the trip back into town from UC Sunnydale kind of longish. By the time Wil got out here they’d probably be in their new room.

‘Oh Goddess; just please. Tell me you’re okay.’

She had already asked that like five times, but Buffy supposed her bestie had a right to be freaked. “I promise, Wil,” she repeated. “Oh, and can you bring some money?” Being the one of the two of them who had not been forced to do slaying on the side after school, Willow had managed to pull a work-study job for cash. Which was kind of a nice bonus, since her parents had to pay most of her tuition. The job was mostly for covering books and stuff, but she had a little money on the side here and there. It came in handy for coffee and things like that. 

/And to bail out roomies who need you to buy them a bucket o’ blood for their vampire rescues…/

‘Some… oh. Okay. I have… a few bucks. Sure. I’ll… see you soon?’

“Great. Thanks, Wil. And remember, don’t tell anyone.”

‘Okay, but if you’re in some room hooked up with some guy, I’m so gonna give you crap for, like, ever… oh. My. God… is it Angel? Please do or don’t say it’s Angel…’

For some bizarre reason, Buffy felt weirdly glad that Spike was waiting up on the upstairs walkway and couldn’t hear this conversation. “No, I’m not here with Angel.” /So far from it./ “See you soon.” She hung up before she was asked to expend any more of their combined change, headed back upstairs. And was met with an odd look. “What?”

“On her way, is she?”

“Yeah. She’ll probably get here right about when we check in.”

Spike eyed her with that strange expression predominating, then leaned back and away. “Aren’t you worried to feed me up, let me heal, knowin’ the chip doesn’t work now?”

Buffy felt a huge, swoopy thing take up residence in her belly and start doing calisthenics. She still very much did not want to deal with this question. Actually, she was kind of mad at him for bring it back up, being as she had gone back to successfully avoiding the subject in her own mind ever since the last unfortunate mention. /We’re in a time-out, dammit, Spike! Get with the stupid program!/  ** ** “Can we not talk now?” she demanded, and kept her eyes everywhere but on him.

“Fine. If that’s the way you want it.” But the strange note in his voice lingered to remind her that he still probably had that weird, examining look in his eye as he watched the back of her head.

***

“Can I… ask you something about something you said?”

Spike shrugged, flicking at the cigarette he had bummed. He was still nursing that first one; watching the thing studiously like he planned to smoke it halfway, to the millimeter, before snuffing it out and saving the rest for later. “Open book, Slayer.”

She kind of doubted that, but… “You said you aren’t human, so it doesn’t bother you to eat people.”

He went abruptly tight-lipped. “Yeah.”

She wanted to understand. A day ago she wouldn’t have cared. It would all just be disgusting, stake-worthy evil, but now… It was informational, and interesting, and… And, unbidden, the traitorous thought rose, /Angel never talked to me about any of it. He could have told me so many things, but he never…/ “You used to be.” The words came out as if it were someone else saying them.

“Was,” her current vampire companion agreed curtly. 

“And that part doesn’t bother you?” 

He made a sort of light, dismissive noise. “Don’t spend too much time thinkin’ about it, pet. Gotta eat to live, yeah? Don’t always have to kill to eat, but especially when you’re young and the bloodlust is on you…” He shrugged lightly. “Tough to hold back, and once you’ve that pattern in you, it’s difficult to unlearn. To hold back from the high. That becomes more important than knowin’ you’re takin’ away someone’s… whoever they might be.” His eyes drifted over her. “Somebody’s everything…” he whispered, then shook his head slightly. Yanked his eyes away. “It’s all just a whirl. Fucking, fighting, feeding… Easy to become feral. If you live long enough you can slow down, smell the roses, enjoy humanity again, but it takes a bit.”

It was there, but unspoken. He had slowed down, smelled said roses. And his words were a revelation. He could recognize that he was taking away people who were important to others. He could…

Wait. He had said he didn’t have to… to kill to feed? “You don’t have to…”

His lips twitched. “More efficient to drain someone, innit? Lasts longer. Average human’s got one, one and a half gallons of blood in ‘em dependin’ on size. That’s around ten pints per. I need about a pint a day minimum to stay in good workin’ order; human, not animal. Bit more if it’s not human. That’s one unit, hospital standard. Do I get more at a go, I don’t have to feed every day. I hold back, take too little from a person, I have to go through the effort of hunting every other damn day, and do all the soddin’ work of wooin’ the fool, makin’ ‘em forget, makin’ ‘em think it’s sex, controllin’ myself. But if I don’t…” He lifted one shoulder, dropped it casually. “Two pints, maybe, for a donation. Three’s dangerous. At four pints, though; that’s dead. No struggle, no witness, less work, an’ I’m good for a few days. On top of which I’ve a nice body with six more pints in it for take-away, so you do the math.”

Buffy closed her eyes and struggled to hold her human gorge, her immediate, internal Slayer’s reaction, which was to dust the threat right there for his casual dismissal of the value of the human life she had been created to protect. Fought to tamp all that down, see it from his perspective. Cold, hard calculation. And from that point of view… it did make sense. 

Except that, when you came out the other side of that equation, you still had a dead person with a life and a family and people to mourn them, every ten days for a vamp his age. More often if he only took the four pints and moved on. “So… you just don’t think about it?”

“It is what it is, Buffy. At least these days I’m not killin’ every day like a soddin’ fledge.”

She really didn’t want to ask how much  _ they _ ate. It sounded pretty clear that they were either really hungry, really uncontrollable, or just really, really wasteful. 

It would be so easy to believe, hearing this, that Spike was just a detached demon; a monster and nothing more, as she had been taught. No human emotion left in him at all to care. Except… she had seen it. Seen those emotions.  _ Needed _ to understand.

She hesitated, sure she was crossing some line… but she absolutely had to know. “I was taught that who the person was before they were sired is gone. That it’s all demon, all the time after that, just wearing a human suit, so who I was killing was…”

“A thief, is it?” Spike sounded cynically amused.

Buffy couldn’t answer that. She felt prickles running up and down her spine, into her hairline. “One time, um… Angel started to hint that we were wrong about that. He sort of cut off before we could really get into it, but…”

“Because he wouldn’t want to admit it’s rubbish,” Spike muttered, and ground out the cigarette. “Angelus is just a wanker who hates his soul is all, didn’t like the man he was, so he tried to grind the bastard into dust, make it so there was nothin’ left of Liam. But you can’t do away with the man. Demon comes here knowin’ nothin’ of this place. It needs the human to know how to get on. What’s left of the human, the part the demon saves, needs to cling to the demon, or they’ll be gone entire. There’s as much of Liam left in Angelus as there is in Angel. He just tries like hell to pretend it’s not true.” 

Buffy’s world rocked. Whatever she had thought she might hear, this wasn’t it. “That… that can’t be true,” she heard herself whisper. 

The cut-glass features twisted painfully. “Is though. Half the shite he does is to deny his humanity an’ everyone else’s, ‘cause he can’t escape it.” Cobalt eyes turned to her, catching sapphire glints at the edges of sunlight. “Why the bloody hell do you think he does it all?”

Buffy had no answer for that. “He hated me,” she answered softly. “Angel loves me.”

Spike scoffed, dark and intimate from the shade of the eaves. “Angelus was never so passionate about anything or anyone unless it made him feel. He was passionate about Darla, and about Dru, in his own way. About everything else he was impassive as hell… save maybe the hunt. His sodding ‘art’. Those things were the closest he came to love… and even in that, Dru came out a distant third.” Another sharp, sneering huff. “The bugger loved you as much as he was ever capable of, pet, or he would’ve scarpered off the second he got free of the soddin’ soul. He hated the very idea of facin’ down a Slayer.” Blue eyes pinned her down, fiercely ablaze. “That’s my gig, in case you don’t recall. Never was his. Oh no. You got to him, Slayer, make no mistake. Or why do you think he wanted to end the world?”

“What?” She was shaking now. He wasn’t making any sense.

Spike’s eyes, though, had turned inward. “He had to kill you to see to it you stopped haunting him. Had to destroy you, or he’d have to admit you’d conquered him, broken somethin’ in him. Reft the animal from him, made him weak.” Something twisted harshly in his low, rumbling voice. “He couldn’t have that, could he? Not a right old monster like him.” And turning sharply away from her, he folded the stub of cigarette into his hand. “I’ll go fetch those keys.”

Buffy remained behind for a moment, blinking tears away into the early afternoon sunlight.

***

They had in fact just retrieved their keys from the odious little jerk at the desk and checked into their new—and pretty much basically the same—room when Wil arrived. They had had barely enough time to register that the place was arranged slightly differently (bed on the opposite side, different ugly landscape print on the wall above it, same gold-and-orange bedspread with slightly different suspicious stains, same peeling-veneer furniture; like a mirror image. Spike had moved immediately to check the status of the TV, sighed with relief to see it was functional… and looked up when the knock came. Flicked it back off, and eyed Buffy expectantly. 

“I’d better make sure it’s her…”

“It’s her. Can smell her. Right heartbeat.”

“Well, you’re handy.” /Creepy, but handy./ Sighing, Buffy squared up to the door. “Guess it’s showtime.” And, telling the massive butterflies in her stomach to chill, stop acting like those clay pigeons rich people shot at while they zinged across the sky at fifty miles an hour, she faced the knob. /Let’s do this./ 

When Buffy cracked the door on the security chain, Willow was standing on the other side, looking frazzled and worried and freaked… and  _ man _ was she was a sight for sore eyes. “Hey.”

“Hey!”

Buffy slipped the chain, then hesitated. “Okay, don’t freak when you come in. It’s not what it looks like.”

“It’s not what I… What am I supposed to…” Wide-eyed, Wil followed the door’s path as Buffy pulled it open. As she entered her eyes went wider… and wider…

Buffy turned to see why, and rolled hers. “For God’s sake, Spike.” 

He had decided to totally make it look like it was what it looked like, and was all sprawled out on the bed, which he had apparently torn open while Buffy was busy opening the door. He was facing Wil now, grinning savagely with one eyebrow up, one hundred percent cocky charm like a giant dick, boots off, all bare feet and casual self-possession.

With a heavy sigh, Buffy stalked right over to the bed, grabbed one of the pillows from the askew pile of blankets, and threw it directly in his face.

He took the gesture with equanimity. “Ta, luv.” And, to her mild irritation, he stuffed the thing under his arm, folded his elbow, propped up his head, and lifted a brow at Willow. “Alright, Red?”

Willow turned to Buffy, gaping. “Wh…”

“It’s a long story,” Buffy repeated her earlier stopgap.   


“A long… Buffy, you’ve been missing since last  _ night! _ Giles is freaking, he’s afraid to tell your mom you’re missing,  _ we’ve _ been freaking, Xander thinks Spike must’ve  _ killed _ you…” She waved her hands around a little in clear, shocked exasperation. “And the whole time you’ve been  _ here _ , in the  _ motel _ ,  _ with _ Spike…” 

/So, this is getting out of hand./ “Okay, first of all, Wil, take it down a notch and breathe.” Wil did, responding to the reminder that oxygen was a thing and inhaling a few all-important breaths like a trooper. “Second of all, there’s a reason. Several, actually, but we’re not going to get into them now…”

“But…”

Buffy could feel Spike’s eyes drilling pointedly into the back of her head. /Oh, calm down. Like I’m gonna air your dirty laundry to Willow./ “Mostly because I just can’t tell you all of it. It’s not even all mine to tell…”

“Buffy, I don’t understand what you’re saying! You’re shacked up in a motel with Spike!  _ Spike! _ What’s going  _ on?” _

/Okay, shacked up is a little extreme./ It irritated Buffy, and she heard her own voice go flat. “I can’t tell you what’s going on, Wil, but I need you. I need your help. Can I trust you to keep this to yourself for a little while, kinda stall Giles and Xander when they start asking you to do a locator spell on me?”

Willow looked abruptly totally wigged. It was apparently one thing to promise that over the phone when she didn’t know the pertinents, but now she seemed to really think her friend was super in trouble, and she didn’t want to promise anything anymore. “I… Um… Okay, Buffy, look. I love you, and I care about you, and I wanna help you, but the thing is, what if you’re in serious trouble and I didn’t tell anyone and something went crazy wrong and it turned out to be my fault…”

Time to pull out the big guns. Buffy really hated to do it, but, “I promise, I really am okay, Wil. I swear. And… you  _ owe _ me.”

A cleared throat from behind her on the bed, and a low, almost subsonic vampiric rumble. “You owe  _ us, _ she means.”

/Not  _ helping _ , Spike./

Something that looked like pained, terrified realization crossed Wil’s face, and she turned white as a sheet. “Oh my God, Buffy, is this because…”

/Dammit./ Time to stamp on that one, super fast. “No. All I can tell you is that I need you to not tell anyone we’re here, and I need you go out and get us some blood for Spike…”

Wil stared at her as if she had lost her mind. “Buffy, I…”

_ “Please _ , Wil.”

Wil sighed heavily and looked defeated. “Okay, but if this turns out to be some kind of insane-o hellmouthy thing and it all goes kablooey, it’s totally on your head! I don’t want to be blamed at  _ all _ , alright?”

“Deal.”

Wil bit her lip. “So… blood.”

“Yeah.” Buffy frowned and half-turned toward her vampire charge, feeling slightly worried that he would rebel or something if she even asked. Maybe making the effort to pay someone off for the good stuff would keep him happy enough to… well…

They’d have to haggle for it, of course, and they only had a few bucks left on their end, which made it tough, but… /I’d have to ask Wil to stay, go do it myself. ‘Course, that’d be risking something blowing up or coming out between them while I’m gone./ And there was the fact that for some bizarre-ass reason she couldn’t explain to herself, Buffy just really, really didn’t want to leave Spike right now; not even in Willow’s capable care.

Almost as if he could read her mind, Spike flipped a hand at her, visible in her peripheral vision, and exhaled in exasperation. “I’m not gonna run off and…” He clicked his teeth together over the impulsive phraseology before he could out himself, rerouted his verbiage. “…Go off half-cocked, Slayer, if I’m stuck with the swill. Though it might taste a bit better with burba weed or summat to give it a bit of flavor…”

A shrill of terror darting through her, Buffy swung back to Willow, wondering if she would catch the implications of the slip. It was a terrifying thought that her friend might hear it, demand to know how Spike could ‘run off half-cocked’ and do anything dangerous right now; and worse, if Buffy knew he  _ could _ , why she hadn’t already staked him, and… And… And Buffy heard herself demand, “What the heck is burba-weed?” 

No need to ask herself why she was running interference, protecting Spike’s secret. At this point, she was also protecting herself, and /Oh my God, we’re in this together now, this just like when I was hiding Angel from Giles and everyone all over again, oh crap, they’re so gonna see it exactly that way and they’re gonna freak, they’re gonna…/

Wil was eyeing them with a strange look on her face. “It’s something they sell over at the Cupboard. I mean, it doesn’t sell  _ well _ , but…” She narrowed her eyes at Buffy as if studying her. 

/Oh God, here it comes, here it…/ Steeling herself, Buffy held her breath. Found herself gripping the thighs of her jeans so tightly that her fingers almost punched through the denim, so tightly that she bruised her own flesh, and she might just hyperventilate, she might…

“You know, I think there might be some leftovers of the spell on you, whatever you say, Buffy. It’s uber-weird the way you two are communicating right now; totally like a married couple, almost.” She frowned a little. “It’s kind of freaking me out. Like you’re having whole conversations without talking.” She shook her head. “You should probably stop it. It’s massively wigsome.”

Buffy let out her breath so hard she might have damaged her lungs. “Sorry; I didn’t realize we were… communicating.”

Behind her on the bed, Spike snorted without moving from his lazy, reclining position. “‘S just a vamp-Slayer thing, Red. Pay it no mind.” 

“It’s a what?” Wil demanded, startled.

“Slayer can sense me. I can sense the Slayer. What?” he finished, all innocence. “She never told you?”

Buffy swiveled to gape at him. Talk about overextending an explanation to make it sound like they hadn’t built some kind of history in the last twenty-four hours or whatever… /God, it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours!/ It already seemed like days. 

But for real. Yes, she could feel when he was present, creeping around nearby, and maybe—maybe, on a good day—if his intent was seriously of the immediate, slavering, looming badness. And maybe he could suss out the same from her. Predator-senses, aimed at one another, gunning for the top-spot; and maybe she got more from him because he was her, like, preferred prey or whatever, the one she was made to take out the most. And maybe he got more from her because she was his only true predator, so he also got sort of prey-sensations around her to stay alive and kicking (or whatever)… but that didn’t mean they could read each other’s minds or whatever moonshine he was spinning right now.

“Stronger, since I’m older, yeah? Master vamps put off stronger vibes than fledges, I’d imagine…”

Buffy shivered involuntarily. Boy howdy, they did. Compared to the faint neck-tinglies of a day-old fledge, or even the pleasantly solid shiver a decent twenty- or thirty-year-old vamp gave her, Spike felt like being dipped in a full-body bathtub of shimmery water; not too hot, not too cold, but just right, and filled with ten million tiny bubbles just fizzing and sliding all over her skin at every second, so that she was completely alive and exquisitely aware to the point of bursting, and…

/And I should so not be thinking about this, much less dwelling on it./ She had very much learned to put it out of mind, the insistent yearning for the feeling, the siren-song magnetism of it, the heady, drug-like buzz that required some sort of action;  _ now _ , anything, please, before she climbed out of her skin. Fight, strike, touch, kick, kill, do  _ something _ , god! 

“Is this true, Buffy?”

“Huh?”

“What he said about putting off stronger vibes the older a vamp is?”

Buffy’s attention snapped back to the present with a sharp, painful lurch. “Oh. Um, yeah. Lothos was like that, but I didn’t get what it meant at the time. I thought I was just losing my mind. But the Master was so powerful he almost knocked me down even being in the cavern. The buzzing all over my skin, in my ears… it was all so loud I couldn’t even think. It was how he got me thralled so easy. I, um, hadn’t had enough, you know, exposure, to learn how to resist it.” Spike’s eyes were trained on her, oddly glittering. “And Kakistos was just nuts. But I could handle it more, by then, since I’d been training, and spent so much time around Angel. He was old enough to feel… strong. I got used to the feeling; got to where I could deal with it.” That magnetism still drew her in to this day, of course, like a metal filing whenever her ex was near. It drove her crazy, dammit… and now that she thought about it, why should it feel as strong around Spike? He was at least a little younger than Angel, though who knew by how much. /Is it because you’re all demon, with no soul in the way?/ 

No, because Angel hadn’t felt that way even after… Well, after he became Angelus.

/Maybe it’s because of the way you’re all Slayer-focused. Or…/

Buffy shook her head a little, fighting to negate the sensation now that it had been brought so sharply to her attention. It was always tougher to ignore it when it was at the forefront of her mind. /Shake it off, Buffy. It’s just background noise in your life, now, remember? Just a thing you deal with. Like cramps or something. It comes… and it goes./ “Kakistos should have been tougher, huh? But he also felt more like… I dunno; more demon-y, more wild, less part-human-y. Easier to tune out in some weird way…” 

“Some of the really old ones surrender so much to the demon that they give up on all this handy camouflage,” Spike pointed out blandly, and jabbed a forefinger to his cheek. “Come right out the other side into bein’ just another monster. No need for you to go about sensin’ ‘em in that way, I ‘magine, if you can spot ‘em right out.” 

He had a point. /Huh. I wonder if that’s why Angelus felt about the same level as Spike even though he’s older? Because he was so inhuman?/ 

Okay, so not a good road to go down, thinking too much of her ex and his wildly unattractive demonside.

Spike shrugged off Buffy’s surprised glance. “Nest would’ve been the same, I’ll wager, in another few hundred years, way he was headed.”

“Nest?”

“Heinrich Nest; the one you call the bloody Master. As if he was the only soddin’ one. My great-great, innit?”

“Great-great…”

He scowled a little. “Grandsire.”

_ “Excuse _ me?”

That one earned her a narrowed, indigo glare. “Nest to Darla to the Poofter… Angelus,” he explicated at their lost looks. “To Dru, to me. One big happy.” At their continued, blinking incomprehension, “Oh, don’t bloody tell me the Great Forehead never even mentioned that he was related to the git as first did you in?”

Buffy stared in shock. “He… um, never brought it up.” /Angel’s  _ related _ to the  _ Master? _ / She simply couldn’t absorb it.

Taking in her stunned amazement and mild horror, Spike subsided back onto the bed. Flung his hands to his knees in exasperation. “Well, doesn’t that just bloody figure, huh? How the bleedin’ hell do you think he knew so much about the Order, how the rituals worked, all that rot? Darla raised him up to be a right little Aurelian, didn’t she? He told me when he was plottin’ against you that he let you go in there alone, once. Laughed about it, that he’d told you he was scared to face them. Didn’t tell you I guess that it was because he’d be a sodding liability. If he came face-on with any vamp his senior in that nest they could have controlled him, or at least tried.”

_ ‘Because I’m scared…’ _ Buffy winced in memory. Had Angel really been afraid not of the sheer numbers in there, or of facing his own kind and proving himself a traitor, but because he had been  _ known _ to them? Because they were of his bloodline and could put him under some sort of vampy thrall, or control him in some bizarre vampiric fashion, or…

/God, why didn’t you  _ tell _ me, Angel?/

“The old bent whore was a religious bitch, for all she was as much a psychopath as he was, in her own way. She made sure he knew his duty, knew his kin, and was known to them. It was just, Angelus preferred the high life to kowtowing to Nest, and he convinced her he could show her a better time aboveground partying amongst the humans than she could show him huddling down in the hellmouth playing Nest’s latest butt-boy, and she didn’t want to share him with the ol’ arse-bandit. Else I’d never exist, innit? Still be sleepin’ peaceful in my grave, human as I ever was.” He shrugged a little. “Never did thank ol’ grandmum for that. Never was much of a mind to be religious, m’self, come to that, though she insisted we all knew where we came from, ‘to what we owed the pleasures of the world’.” His lips twisted slightly in some sort of apparently-painful memory. “Let Angelus run the nest… but she ran Angelus, so it came to the same thing in the end, yeah? It was just, he had all the responsibility and she had to do none of the work, but got all the perks.” His head tilted slightly. “Wonder who eventually did her in. Felt her go…”

“Angel did it,” Buffy whispered. “I didn’t know she was his sire till later.”

Spike snorted grimly. “Well, that figures. He did her, she couldn’t use a sire-command on him, tell him to leave off helping you. Wouldn’t have worked so well on him by then, no doubt, as he’d long since broken the bleedin’ fledge-bond; atop of which he had that great nancy soul of his running interference. But they’d still be tough to manage if she stopped trying to seduce him back, lost patience and told him right out.” 

/A sire-command? A sire can  _ do _ that?/ 

/God, no wonder he’d staked her!/

“Any road, he wouldn’t have to face her haunting him anymore, mocking him for moving on to a pert, virginal new blonde.”

Buffy felt her entire being freeze. “Go to hell, Spike.”

“Already there, luv.”

/Huh?/

“How come you never said?” Wil’s voice broke in, sounding lost in thought. 

“What?” The demand came out harsher than it really should have, Buffy was so stung by the denouement of Spike’s sullen little diatribe. /Not Willow’s fault./ With an effort, she tempered her voice. “Never said what?”

“The thing about the buzzy vamp-sense thing, and the stronger older vamps, and the having to get used to it by hanging around with Angel…”

“Oh.” Buffy grimaced. “I just… never thought about… I was, you know, made for vampires.” /What did I just… No!/ “I mean, made to fight them, so I just… figured it was part of the deal. You know, I have to be able to sense them, to find ‘em and fight ‘em, and…” All bitterness fled, Spike was smirking at her now and looking totes amused, the jerk. “I just never realized it was a thing I needed to bring up.” She lifted a hand and dropped it helplessly. “It just… is?”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

Willow looked fascinated. “And you can tell if they’re, what? Pissed off? About to attack?” Her eyes darted over to their pale, red-eyed fellow room-companion. “Mega-hungry?”

Buffy rolled her eyes. With how weirdly intently Spike was regarding her, she kind of wished she had another pillow to throw at him. “Or just lurking around everywhere being irritating.” 

“Oi!”

Buffy sighed in exasperation. “And yeah, I can feel when they’re seriously on the prowl, versus just being bored and kind of wanting to raise hell.” She shot the lounging vamp another ‘stay put’ kind of warning glare. “Spike’s seriously hovering between option B and option A by now, so do me a favor, Wil and bring some blood so I don’t have to sit on him and hold a stake over his chest?”

Spike grinned saucily. “You gonna do that bit again where you run your fingers over your throat and tell me how nice you smell?”

Buffy stared. Okay, that was stepping right over the line. Was he actually  _ flirting _ with her right now? Was he…  _ allowed _ to flirt, after… what had just happened to him? “Don’t be a pig, Spike.” Snapping the old lines seemed a hollow, worn-out ritual by this point, devoid of any bite. Empty ceremony, but it kept her sane, kept her from thinking too much, kept everything in its place. Right-side-up. 

His grin turned lascivious, his voice throaty. “All that blood just pumpin’ away, and here you’re threatenin’ to hop right on up and straddle me with your stake…”

Wil was starting to get positively alarmed. “I’ll go get the blood. I’ll be back.  _ Really _ fast. Don’t move!”

The second the door closed behind her Buffy whirled, aghast. “What. Was.  _ That?” _ she hissed, shocked and incredulous.

Spike’s face cleared of any and all lewd intent, and he managed, of all things, to look utterly innocent. “Got her out of here, didn’t it?” And then, incredibly, he closed his eyes, laid his head back on the pillow she’d thrown at him, and appeared to slip directly into an exhausted-looking power-nap.

Just wow.

Sometimes Buffy truly had no clue what to make of William the Bloody, slayer of Slayers.

***

Willy didn’t really want to talk much to Hellions. He kind of hoped that if he kept his answers short they would eventually just go away. “Yeah, she’s in college. What of it?”

“So, how often does the bitch come back into town?”

/Hellions, twice in a week. Just my luck./ 

He had to cooperate though, or seem like it, or they’d kill him, turn over his bar in that kind of way that meant there would be no putting it back together. The kind of way that involved burning. “Oh, you know.” He tried for a nonchalant little laugh, though it mostly came out nervous. “She’s around. Takes the bus in practically every night, still. Or at least every other night.” He waved his hand at the denizens of the bar, who were all sitting around peaceably; mostly because none of them wanted to tangle with the visitors. “She’s a real professional, this one. I wouldn’t pick a fight with her. See how everyone’s behavin’ themselves?”

The more garrulous of the two Hellions rolled his eyes in his skinny, metal-encrusted face. “Yeah, I noticed. Buncha pussies.” He leaned forward, then, onto the bar, eyes intent on Willy’s. “Noticed she hasn’t been around much the last coupla nights, though.”

Willy started to get more than a little nervous. “Guys, c’mon. I don’t have a bell on the girl, y’know? As long as she’s not in here roughin’ me up, no skin off mine, right? She leaves me alone, I leave her alone. Once in awhile she beats me down trying to get info, or shakes down one of my customers, but mostly it’s hands off in here…”

The huskier of the two Hellions gave him a withering look, as if he were a talking rat with a death wish. “Look. I’m a businessman,” he protested, lifting his rag-bearing hand. “I’m not about to get dead protecting some idiot who pissed off the Slayer.”

“Oh, like she could be that good. One little girl. Sure she dies just like all the rest.”

Somewhere off to one side, a Folgal scoffed into his mug. Skinny whirled to glare at him. “You got somethin’ to say, Poky?”

The Folgal, a regular by the name of Rick, shrugged his spiny shoulders. “Nope.”

Big-n-husky rose to tower over the other demon’s stool, and Skinny spoke again. “Sure sounds like you do, so spit it out.”

Rick clearly flipped a mental coin, assumed he was going to die anyway, and leaned back to eye the Hellions blandly. “The old Master vamp in the town already tried to kill her once. She came back from the dead and did his ass, and that fucker was like a thousand or some shit. Then she did a fucking Old One. An  _ Old One _ , ya dig? She used TNT or some goddamn thing. Fought another Master vamp with a grudge. Pulled out a bazooka against his ass, dropped a church on him. Two of ‘em at once, actually, and sent Angelus to hell; you ever heard of him? That fucker would drain a Gurak just to watch it reassemble itself. She sent him to hell and then took a nice vacation by the beach.” Shaking his spiny head, Rick turned back to his drink, risking losing all his brains as he did so. “Go ahead and fight her. Doesn’t matter if she’s taking time off to go to college. She’ll do your asses and laugh.”

Willy winced painfully when the big Hellion unceremoniously twisted Rick’s head off. He’d loved that guy. He was a good dude. Also, the mess was gonna be hell to clean off the stool, the bar, the floor. 

Without another word, the two invaders bailed to, he hoped like hell, tell their buddies the Slayer here was too bad and they should book it out of town. /Please, just leave, alright? We’re not ripe for your kind of fun. Seriously./ 

And, for the first time since about when that dickhead Angelus was running around trying to end the damn world, Willy started praying—though to whom was debatable—that their pint-sized, ambivalent little warrior princess would get her ass back from wherever she was holed up and realize maybe the town was in deep shit.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
So... How about that Spike?  
And how about that Rick?  
And how about some blood before things get any hotter?  



	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this chapter is kind of pivotal. There's important revelations on both sides, whether some people are truly, fully admitting things to themselves or not on at least one side (because some people are much more convoluted of brain than other people, and are excellent at not admitting to themselves that they are not admitting something)...   
innocent
> 
> Huge kudos as always to my betas; this time, specifically for making sure Spike's blood didn't get overcooked, poor starving vamp. That thing was in the microwave for about five minutes in the first draft. 
> 
> (Yes, I read dialogue with a stopwatch app. Shut up. I care about our bleached babe.)

Wil was back in about forty-five minutes with a couple quarts of pig’s blood. “Is, um, this enough?” she asked when Buffy opened the door, looking anxious.

“Yeah. Totally. For now. Thanks, Wil.”

Spike was already up and crowding behind Buffy, way in her personal space and practically breathing down her neck—or would be, if he breathed—basically begging for it. Seemed like pig-blood was just dandy if you were hungry enough. “Here.” She took one of the Styrofoam containers from Wil’s overloaded hands and passed it back to him.

Grabbing it, he whirled and headed straight for the tiny microwave under the TV. “Bloody thing better work,” he grumbled, crouching a little too gingerly. 

Yeah. He needed that blood, stat.

As the promising  _ bloop-bloops _ commenced, Wil entered, handing Buffy the second carton. Buffy opened the little fridge, shoved it onto the one shelf, frowned at the sort-of-cool interior, and quickly closed the door in hopes of trapping whatever chill might exist in there so Spike’s next meal wouldn’t go bad. It was better than nothing. 

“So, um… you’re really staying here another night?”

Buffy’s eyes trailed back over her shoulder. And she froze. Spike was still crouched in front of the microwave, waiting for the short minute and a half or whatever for the stuff to get to the right temp… and there was…

/Oh God…/ There was a small, but growing, stain on the seat of his…

He was bleeding again.

Whirling away, she swallowed the lump in her throat to nod briskly at Wil, and fought back the tears in her eyes. “Um, yeah. Another night. And then, um, I’ll let you know what my, um, plans are…”

“Buffy…”

Buffy was strangely torn all of a sudden. She wanted to protect Spike… and she felt abruptly way over her head, loathe to let Wil leave. /God, if I could just  _ tell _ her, she could do a healing spell or something, right? Or… maybe she could do a sort of general one without knowing… the particulars? A sort of ‘make this person all better’ spell? Or would she sense what was, um, wrong when she did it?/ “Uh, Wil, are there any spells that can just, you know, generally make a person, um… More physically fit, without having to have, you know, a specific focus? Like, that would just rush through a person’s body and cue up their, um… I dunno; their vitality if their…” She struggled for roundabout verbiage. “Um… Immune system was compromised or something?”

Spike had gone exceptionally still to one side of her… and crap. She didn’t think that Wil could hear it, that low, almost subsonic growl, but she sure could. It was more a ‘sensing a threat’ thing than it was a hearing thing, but he was for sure was warning her that she was treading right on the edge of his no-fly zone. 

“Well, I mean, sure,” Wil answered, absently rubbing the hairs that were currently standing up on her forearms in response to a stimulus she couldn’t hear. “Spells that target the heart, get the white blood cells pumping to jumpstart healing…”

/Well, shit./ Those were out. No heartbeat, no jumpstarting blood-flow, yadda.

“…You know, that kind of thing.” Concern turned Willow’s already anxious tones almost chipmunk-y. “Why, are you okay? Please tell me you’re…”

“No. I’m fine.” Defeated for the nonce, Buffy turned away to take a seat in what would no doubt be her throne for the remainder of the evening, sighed heavily. Spike, she noted in passing, had relaxed again, slightly, at his station before the microwave. /God, chill. I was just trying to help./ 

Well, at least maybe she could ease her mind, considering she was punking out on her duties and crap. Get an update. “Uh… So, how are things? I know I haven’t been out to patrol for a night…”

Wil was still watching her as if looking for covert signs of injury. “Okay, actually. I mean, it’s not like you haven’t had to take a night off before, right? When you were sick, or whatever…”

“Yeah.” And she still felt guilty about it, like she had faltered at her post or something. 

A thoughtful look crossed her friend’s pixyish features. “Actually, it’s totally like there’s some weirdness going down, now you mention it.” Willow looked briefly concerned. “Giles said the demons are acting a little weird; all kind of hiding out. Which is nice, I guess, in the not getting into any trouble kinda way. But isn’t that usually a sign that something even bigger and badder is on the way?”

Buffy fought not to sigh heavily. /Of  _ course _ there’s something. There’s  _ always _ something./ “Can you guys hit the books till I get back? See if it’s another third moon before the last night of Gurglemahk or whatever? Or, you know, just ask Anya? She knows weird stuff like that.”

Spike chipped in from his post in front of the microwave, diffident once more but also slightly reserved, almost pensive as he stopped the machine to check the temperature of his meal. “Far as I know, nothin’s coming up. For what it’s worth.” He tugged the carton out, gave it a doubtful sniff.

Buffy contemplated the possibilities for a second or two. “Well, maybe it’s those commando guys freaking everyone out. Maybe the demons are all laying low to stay out of their weird dragnet.”

A grunt issued from the vampire gallery. “I sure the bloody hell would. Sodding Nazis.”

The appellation startled Buffy at first, but upon a little reflection… Huh. She honestly couldn’t blame him for his perspective, considering the whole being nabbed while minding his own (if demon-y) business, caged, drugged, experimented on thing. Though to be fair, the mysterious soldier-guys had definitely made things quieter around Buffy’s territory… which had totally made her job easier lately. /Probably lazy of me to be glad for the help so I can focus on college, huh, since I don’t know who these randos are or what their actual agenda is./ 

Part of her wished she could avoid thinking about things like that; just focus on, like, homework and tests and stuff, like any other student. But such was not the life of a Slayer. “Well, in this case I have to be glad. For at least one night, since quiet means I get to hang.” She had to fight not to look at Spike, shifting uncomfortably in front of the microwave as he poked a finger into his long-awaited meal and frowned at the temperature. How much pain was he in, had he been in all night and morning? And he’d barely let on. God. 

He needed to get that blood in him, ASAP. She prayed it would fix him up, and then…

Wil could read her face, of course. Her hand shot out. Hesitated. Brushed Buffy’s forearm. “Seriously, Buffy… what’s going on?”

Behind her, Buffy shook her head once in quick negation, trying to ignore the sharp, hissing intake of breath from their resident vampire as he leaned forward to shove the carton back into the microwave for another thirty seconds. Spike seemed to be fighting an internal war between desperation and his gag reflex or something right now, which made Buffy wonder if warmer blood was more palatable despite the source. “It’ll be fixed soon, Wil, I promise. You’ve helped a lot. You have no idea. Just… thank you.” She caught the open-mouthed beginnings of another anxious appeal, the uncertainty, cut it off at the pass. “And…  _ please _ . Give me this time without telling Xan and Giles?”

Wil’s eyes darted over behind her. “But what if they ask me about the… um… The Spike thing? I mean, you know how Xander gets, and Giles is bound to wonder, considering he was kind of responsible for him, and…”

Something in Buffy flared. Something that was abruptly pissed at the way Wil was talking about Spike as if he wasn’t right there. Something that was just very suddenly exceptionally tired of doing everything Giles told her to do when it came to her job, instead of listening to him tell her the stuff she didn’t know and then letting her do the part she already  _ did _ know how to do, really well, actually, thank you very much. Some part of her that was stretched way too thin, at the breaking point with what she already knew Xander would say, and assume, if he knew even half of what was going on. /Which is so not fair, because it’s not  _ like _ that, and I’m so  _ tired _ of being punished for something that happened two  _ years _ ago, and…/ 

Despair washed over her, followed swiftly once more by anger, because she knew that Xander very much wouldn’t care that Spike was the victim in this situation. She knew how very much he would think Buffy should just…

Her eyes caught again, inexorably, on the slowly-spreading stain on Spike’s jeans, and the thing inside her snapped. Words were leaving her mouth before she had a chance to consider them in the slightest. “Maybe it’s time Giles and Xander remembered that  _ I’m _ the Slayer, and they’re the support staff. That they’re supposed to back  _ me _ up. I mean, Giles is technically only still my Watcher because I  _ want _ him here; and I  _ love _ Xander, but he forgets that I’m the damn Slayer, not his sister or his ex-girlfriend or something. If I want their advice on how to handle a situation with vampires—which I’ve been dealing with since before I met either of them—I’ll  _ ask! _ Spike and I have this situation covered. And, Wil?”

Wil gaped at her, clearly stunned. 

“Spike is right there. Please don’t talk about him like he isn’t, ever again, okay? I know I used to do it too, but I was wrong.”

The loud _blooping_ of the microwave was deafening in the lull. Spike didn’t even yank out his carton right away. Buffy didn’t look at him, but she could swear she could  _ feel _ him swelling like one of those sponge animals you stuck in a cup of water to watch them expand. 

Best not to turn around right now. He might start chortling or something. No doubt he would take it to extremes. 

In the growing, stunned hush, Buffy was already feeling uncomfortable over her outburst, and crossed her arms defensively over her chest in an effort to stand her ground. Now that the powering irritation had burnt off she was flagging, afraid she had said too much, offended Wil, was wondering if she should apologize…

“You’re right,” Wil whispered. “I never thought about it, all these years, but… You’re the Slayer. We should… back you up more. It’s just… We’ve always run the Scoobies like a committee, till I guess we forgot that… we do have a leader, and that’s you.” She looked down at her feet. “I trust you, Buffy.”

Buffy dropped her eyes. Huffed out a breath. And realized belatedly that she was shaking. “That… means more than I can say, Wil, since I know sometimes I’ve screwed up…” /And it got everyone terrorized. And Miss Calendar dead. And Giles tortured. And almost ended the world. And…/ God, was she screwing up again? 

Wil bit her lip, still looking uncertain as heck, but she shrugged a little. “We’re all human. We screw up. But you never stop doing your best, and that’s all anyone can ask.” Pulling Buffy into a quick, surprise hug, she squeezed hard, then turned swiftly away and headed to the door, sounding embarrassed. “Okay. I’ll, um… go now.” Her eyes darted to Spike, who had wrenched the microwave open once more and was pulling out the container with jerky, avid, hungry movements. It was clear she was trying to decide whether to apologize for ignoring him, or to just run away. “I… I’m sorry that I… talked over your head, Spike.”

Wil always was the bigger person. The gesture seemed to startle the hell out of Spike. He stared at her for a second, then nodded once, sharply. “Used to it by now. Appreciate it, though. Cheers, Red.”

With a quick sort of one-quarter of a blush, she jerked her eyes away, back to Buffy. “Let me know if you… need anything else?”

“I will,” Buffy answered softly, and touched her arm in gratitude. “Thanks, Wil.”

Wil reached for the scarred doorknob, then paused. Shoved her hand into her olive-green messenger bag with the glittery sequins, tugged out a folder. “Notes. From Psych. Professor Walsh was on fire today. Thought you might like… I mean, to pass the time…”

“Oh. Yeah. Thanks, that’s actually really great.”

“Do you need my book? I already did the homework…”

/Of course you did./ “I mean, if you’re okay with…”

“Yeah, sure. Here’s some extra paper…” Tugging out the text, Wil handed over all the items. Glanced back over at Spike, who was stirring the blood with one finger and wincing. Buffy followed her eyes to see him tugging out the digit to the tune of curses and shaking it in the air. Probably too hot. “Uh… Okay, well…”

“We really appreciate it, Wil.” Buffy wished she could say, ‘And I’ll tell you everything later’, but she so could never promise that. The best she could give was wholehearted sincerity. “Thank you.”

God, it felt weird to not be able to tell Wil a thing. But it  _ really _ wasn’t hers to tell.

“Of course,” Wil answered softly. 

She didn’t say that it meant a lot that Buffy had asked her above anyone else. After all, it was complicated. ‘Who else  _ would _ she ask?’ had been trumped by ‘You just stuck me with a thing I might not want, and I don’t even know what it is to consent to it’, along with that whole, ‘You owe us’ thing. Which had, honestly, spread a little bit of yuck over the ‘best friends’ yum. Buffy now kind of regretted pulling that card, but… /Dammit, I kind of  _ had _ to./

Things used to be a lot less complicated between her and Wil. /What’s happening, though?/

Wil gave her a last little worried look as she slipped out of the door. Buffy stood to lock it behind her, stayed there for a moment with her hand on the deadbolt. Let out her breath, heavy with regret. 

“Sorry about it, Slayer.” Spike’s voice, when he broke the silence, actually did sound vaguely rueful. 

Buffy squared her shoulders and turned, shook it off. “Never mind. Everything’ll be fine.” Strode purposefully over to him and grabbed away the Styrofoam carton before he could read her intent. 

“Oi!”

“Oh, calm down.” Blowing on it, she reached in with one of her own fingers. “Yep, too hot. I’ll get it to the right temp, since I can feel…”

He reached to snatch it back, fighting her for possession of his long-awaited meal. “Your breath’s not as cool as mine. Take you twice as bloody long…” 

She batted him away. “Okay, but I’m human-temp. I can tell you when it’s right, ‘cause it’ll feel like nothing to me when it is. It’ll practically burn you either way…”

He leaned away briefly to regard her, eyelids slitted. “Know how warm humans are, Buffy. Been eating ‘em for a hundred twenty sodding years; enough to know fresh blood’s warmer than flesh comin' off the tap. Know how the blood smells when it’s right. And any road, you’re warmer than most…”

She blinked at that, nonplussed enough to forego gagging at the whole, all-too-casual 'from the tap' reference. She was aware that she seldom got cold, that she ran warmer even than Xander on most occasions, that she could run around in a babydoll tee when strapping young men she dated wanted hoodies, but she just figured it was because she was all ‘athletic girl’. “I’m warmer, like… measurably?”

That one particularly predatory grin slipped back onto his lips, and his eyes assessed her in a full-body scan that made her wholly uncomfortable. “Slayers tend to be. Blood so hot you could smell it a mile off.” The grin broadened to something almost feral. “Could pick you out of a crowd with my eyes closed, like I had you on infrared.” At her startled jerk he tilted his head, inhaled strongly, nostrils flaring. “Soddin’ ambrosia.” 

She fought not to tremble at the expression on his face. Because what she saw there wasn’t… hunger, per se. Not really, despite his near-starvation. It was something else. Something she couldn’t put a name to at all, and it unnerved the shit out of her, made her step back on her heel to make up a little distance between them. 

“What; you didn’t know? How different you are?”

She closed her eyes. Shoved the carton roughly back at him so that the blood sloshed a little. “Here. You do it then.”

“Don’t spill it!” he protested, but she was already turning away to reclaim her spot on her threadbare chair. 

She remained still and silent for the next several minutes as he impatiently blew and stirred, heard without opening her eyes the hurried gulps as he finally quaffed the contents of the thing; the whole quart, downed in about thirty seconds. 

Damn. He  _ had _ been hungry.

“Better?” she asked softly when she heard the dull scrape of empty Styrofoam sliding across the ugly dresser. 

“Christ,” he muttered in answer. “That almost even tasted good. Hell of a sauce, hunger.”

She found herself praying that it would make a swift difference in his health. At the very least, he already looked slightly less pasty, a little less red around the eyes, which was… good to see. 

Then he shifted a little, and she felt something inside of herself, something that had been built out of hope, fold in on itself. All that insane, inexplicable, unfortunately attractive animal grace of his? It was still missing. He continued to move stiffly, dammit. 

“I’m sorry,” she heard herself murmur into the following silence, and looked away from his strained motions. “I wasn’t trying to out you with Willow. I just wanted to see, you know, if there was a quicker way to get you back in top form.” /Maybe it just takes a while to percolate through his system?/

A short, pregnant pause, then, “Get wantin’ me back in fighting form, pet, so we can go rounds…”

Her jaw tightened. “Oh, shut up. That’s so not the reason.”

“Innit? Tellin’ me you don’t miss the rough an’ tumble? Know I do. Matchin’ up with you was the best thrill I ever had except for…” He stopped abruptly, as if biting down on his words. “I remember fighting you in daylight,” he said instead, and the way his voice caressed the words made a shiver run down her spine, her arms, wrenched her eyes open in spite of herself. He sounded… wistfully intense, if there was such a thing, a tone that drew her eye in spite of herself. 

He was reclining on the bed again, propped up on one palm, watching her with those intent, penetrating, insanely blue eyes dark now with a strange, illegible fervor. “Wind in my hair, breeze in yours. Feelin’ your sun on me. Watchin’ you glow with it. Christ, you blew my mind, pet. I was soddin’ invincible, but when you got brassed you took me down like it was nothing. Bloody hell, do you have any idea how many times I think of that?”

Buffy was not at all sure how to deconstruct this odd confessional. “What, are you saying you want a rematch?”

To her surprise he rolled his eyes, and his voice went crisp again. He stopped stroking every word like he was fondling his memories. “Yeah. Sure. Fine. Always. Why the bloody hell not?”

Buffy looked down at her hands for a second. Frowned into her palms. “I really just want to know that… That you’re able to fight. To protect yourself, if they come back. Want you to be okay…”

“Would have to deal with some questions then that we haven’t been facin’, Slayer.”

Her heart twisted a little. “Which is why…” /Dammit./ She shook her head fiercely, set herself. Lifted her eyes to meet his. “I need to know, Spike.” /Whether I’m royally screwing up again. Like I did with Angel. Whether… Whether Wil’s wrong to put her faith in me this time. Whether I can trust myself to be the leader I’m asking them to trust me to be./ 

It was so easy to doubt herself, let them all walk all over her, when she was sure she had a fatal flaw. And yet, remembering what she had seen yesterday, it was equally, painfully difficult not to fight for that spot. To maintain it; if not for herself, then for his sake. Because he needed her to. 

/As long as… it’s allowed./

Of course, if it wasn’t…

Her mind shied away from even thinking of the alternative. She really couldn’t deal with the ‘if-then’ portion of that equation. 

She knew that meant she was already in too deep, but somehow it was easier to believe that if she just kept denying it, it would make it possible to ignore it when the time came. When she had to put the sword through his chest, too, and send  _ him _ to hell. 

Spike echoed her sigh; a heavy, reluctant exhalation. “Right bloody now, is it?”

/I’m not  _ ready! _ / her mind shrieked, because she already knew the answer. /I can’t do it again, I can’t…/ 

But this was what being the Slayer was, so she did not look away from the regret in his gaze. “Are you… feeling any better?” /Just face each step, one by one, and then…/

He lifted his topmost shoulder, shrugged a little. “I’ll do.”

She nodded, pushed herself to her feet. “Then hit me.”

Eyes on her, he rose. And shook his head. “Not sure I’m up to a real fight just yet, luv,” he confessed, and it was clear that he hated like hell to make the admission.

“Not asking for a fight,” she clarified. “Just hit me, and we’ll know.” /And then I’ll know, for sure./ And then she would have to… decide.

He looked both wary and weary as he drew close, a vast sadness seeming to fall on his taut form. The immutable lines between them were being drawn again, inexorable as ever, which had been in abeyance for a short, stolen time in this liminal space. Drawing even with her, he sucked in a sharp, harsh breath and cocked back his fist. “Not gonna hit you hard, pet,” he informed her, “since this isn’t real.”

He needed to stop pussyfooting around. “Fine. Just do it. It’s not like I can’t block you, you dope.”

He actually looked reluctant, which was bizarre. He was… Spike. He’d never hesitated to swing at her before now. What was his problem? Was it just that she was inviting it, standing there without any clear preparation for self-preservation? Was it the weird setup? Because to be fair, that was getting to her too. The artificiality of it; like they were putting on a play. 

Fine. She’d goad him a little. That always worked. “Seriously, do you need an engraved invitation? If our roles were reversed I’d’ve already gotten like five good ones in by now, and you’d be on your back whining about your nose…”

“Oh, fuck off, Slayer,” he growled, and swung at her.

/Ha!/ she thought triumphantly, ducked the truly sloppy swing—despite his general irritation at her taunts, he was barely trying—and started. They both did, when he fell back against the side of the bed, howling and clutching his head. 

“Fuck! Fuck! Bloody hellChristshite…” Wide-eyed, he stared at her in shock and growing realization. “Oh, bugger.”

‘Oh, bugger’ was right. 

The thing in his head clearly still worked fine. So why hadn’t it…

/Oh./ “So… it just doesn’t work on demons?”

Straightening, dropping his hands from his head, Spike made a quick, reflexive swipe beneath his nose, which, what? 

Oh, he was checking for a nosebleed, and holy crap, did that thing hurt him so bad that it gave him  _ nosebleeds _ sometimes? What even! 

“Doesn’t that just beat all,” he muttered, and dropped back onto the bed. Grunted in pain and immediately shifted position. “Fuck. Well, that actually does fit the reasoning of sadists like those, though. They likely only programmed it to protect humans. Demons don’t count, since we’re not people, yeah? Who sodding cares about what we do to each other.”

Buffy bit her lip, since to be fair it wouldn’t have occurred to her to question such logic before yesterday, either. The sheer bitterness in Spike’s voice, though, made her wonder; and his whole diatribe last night about the many different, inoffensive breeds of demonkind, and the many ways in which the crueler sorts could use, abuse, or hurt them. These commandos couldn’t know which of their captives might be the latter sort… or, for that matter, the former, and need protection from the latter, or… “Um, I guess maybe from their point of view they were only focused on the, um, dietary aspects of vamps?”

Spike rolled his eyes, jammed a pair of fingers to his right temple, rubbed in hard circles. “Yeah, right. Human-centric, is all. Didn’t put much more thought into it than that, I’ll wager.”

Buffy sighed and sat down again, abruptly weakened with the sudden lack of nervous tension. And tried not to notice his clear, deflated disappointment that he was still chained. He probably felt like half of himself or whatever; a ghost of a vampire, because he couldn’t go out and carouse, rock out with his… well, fangs out. Meanwhile, from her perspective it was really just super hard to contain the part of her that felt hardcore, enormous relief that that one question she had been about to face—that one impossible question—had been put on hold. 

The only actual disappointment she could admit to feeling right now was that if she was being candid with herself… she kind of really did miss fighting Spike. “I’m glad… on one level, that I don’t have to… decide anything,” she admitted finally, and wondered why she was being so frank with him. “But also… it sucks.” She shrugged. “You’re more fun when you’re you.”

His hand dropped away, and he tilted his head at her. “Knew you missed it. The rough and tumble.” He had a strange note in his voice as he said it.

She looked away. Bit her lip. “No one else is the kind of challenge you are,” she admitted, almost under her breath. He had vamp hearing. He’d catch it. “I mean, aside from an apocalypse, and those drain me to the point I can’t even deal for weeks. You’re… almost a relief, after weeks of repetitive, lackluster little baby demons and crappy fledges with the fighting skills of day-old lint, and…”

“Glad my periodic visits to dear old Sunnyhell at least provided relief from the tedium of your existence, Slayer,” he answered blandly; but she thought he was smiling. 

It was almost like they were friends, in a weird way. Which was a wrong thought. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Except… /If I ever staked you, how  _ bored _ would I get?/ “I used to sit and wonder when you’d next show up, like a bad penny,” she admitted, and she really needed to go buy a plug for her mouth, stat. “It’s just,” she went on hurriedly, before he could start smirking all smugly and rolling his tongue around at her, “you always  _ do _ show up again. It’s so frustrating that I can’t ever get rid of you, but I know you’re gonna be back. You’re like this… fixture in my life.”

It was what made him so stupidly irritating. She couldn’t dust him. Well, she probably could, but if she did, he wouldn’t come back. And that was… Well. 

She wasn’t ready for him to… not come back. 

/Wrong, wrong,  _ wrong _ , Buffy./

“Nice to know you’ve thought fondly of me while I’ve been off on my travels.”

Okay, he was totally laughing at her now. “I  _ will _ dust you if you don’t shut up.”

He didn’t, of course. He actually chuckled, because he wanted to die. It pushed her to her feet, made her pace. “You’re such a dick…”

“Hey, you just called me indispensable. Sue me if I’m enjoyin’ it a bit, Slayer.”

She couldn’t even come up with a decent reply to that that was remotely appropriately cutting, so she just fell silent; and wow. Were her hands actually  _ shaking? _

She hadn’t realized until just now how scared she had been that she might actually have to stake him. /God, that Acathla thing really screwed you up./ Not that she didn’t know that, but… /But there’s a reason you can’t ever go there again. It’s too painful, too dangerous to your sanity and your heart and your…/

/Wait. Why are you even thinking about that right now?/

Silence had fallen in between herself and the current vampire she didn’t have to stake because he was on good behavior enforced by an unwanted outside source. Said vampire broke the stalemate after some uncounted period, expression thoughtful. “Concerned about what the witch said.”

“Huh?” /Maybe I should have more food. Probably why I’m shaky; didn’t eat enough to make up for practically starving all last night and this morning./ Considering another slice of congealing pie, Buffy waved off that consideration. “There’s always something.” Shot him a quick, stern glance, kept her tones brusque. “Do you need more blood? I want you healed up.”

Spike eyed her thoughtfully. “What if someone everyone fears has just landed in town, pet?”

She didn’t realize at first what he meant. When the words percolated along with their import her eyes rose, and she stared at him, very suddenly afraid. “You don’t think…”

He shook his head then, and firmly set aside the empty Styrofoam cup. “No way to know. Right now, might just be nothin’. That lot aren’t like to hide their light under a bushel, so no news is good news, yeah?”

/No news is good news. Definitely, no news is… of the good./

“Besides. Lines of communication open again and all that rot. Shite hits the fan, Red’ll tell us.”

/Right. Wil would so totally beep me if something like that was going down./ “Um, at least if it  _ is _ them, we know you can… still hit other demons.”

“Yeah,” he answered grimly. “I’ve at least got that left to me.” Turning away, he settled himself back on the bed.

Neither of them remembered that she had turned off her pager.

***

“You should get some more sleep.”

Spike blinked at her a little owlishly, but now that his belly was full, he was clearly exhausted. Also, it was plain that the blood he'd had, while it continued to work its magic in him so that he seemed significantly less peaked than he had been, and had removed still more of that dangerous redness from around his eyes, stubbornly refused to fix him up completely. He continued to move gingerly, without his usual grace and swagger, and though he wasn’t making a big deal about it, he wasn’t… well… sitting a lot. Which…

He probably just needed more rest, a little more blood, and then he’d be right as rain, right? After all, he was playing catch-up from a fairly serious blood-shortage. Obviously he’d been pretty depleted, based on how he slowly he was recovering; not to mention he hadn’t exactly been getting a lot of sleep. He had basically been up the entire time with her—night  _ and _ day—aside from that half-hour snooze, and the slightly longer nap in the morning before his nightmare had woken him. 

“Don’t wanna leave you lonely, Slayer.”

Buffy rolled her eyes at the overly-affected leer. He was trying way too hard. “Just get some rest, Spike,” she answered his insolent look wearily. “I’m just gonna be reading my homework stuff, and you need it. You barely slept this morning.”

The act broke, and he nodded. Sighed. “Am a bit blown.” Glanced over at the bed. He’d been sort of prowling around it like it was his enemy… or maybe like he was trying to stay awake and was afraid to lie down. “Just don’t really fancy closin’ my eyes right now is all.”

/Oh. Oh God./ Was he actually  _ afraid _ to sleep? Afraid of nightmares? Not that she could blame him if he was, considering, but… 

Cue one more nail in the coffin of the ‘demons are one hundred percent of the evil, and vamps are just demons in human suits’. After all, if they were… Well. They’d be too evil to have nightmares, wouldn’t they? “I’ll stand guard,” she managed around a tight throat, and hoped he didn’t catch the thickness in her voice. Her words would serve as a nice double-entendre for him, give him a way out dignity-wise. He could pin it all on her thinking she thought he meant he was worried about what might come barging in or whatever. 

She was, of course, the recipient of a quick, blue look that said she was fooling no one… and then he sighed in defeat. “Want me all healed up, is it?”

“Already said it,” she managed, almost jauntily.

“Right.” With sort of one-quarter of a sigh, he pulled back the blanket and stepped in. Turned resolutely away from her, pulled the covers up over his shoulder, and lay still and unbreathing.

He looked tense as hell, though. Probably a morass of thoughts and emotions.

She would leave him to it. Maybe he’d fall out from sheer boredom, eventually. He had to be exhausted.

At some point he must have, because she looked up once or twice as she blazed through the easier part of the night’s reading (Wil’s notes on behavioral and cognitive psychology, and that one printed-out article on that one kind of therapy based on the theory she was supposed to have read first in the text), and by the time she began paging laboriously through said text his shoulders had softened from rebellious and taut to relaxed. 

That was, until he started twitching, rocking, and moaning over there. /Oh, damn./ 

She tried to ignore it, but her head jerked up of its own accord when he began flat-out  _ talking _ in his sleep. “…Know what? Do it. Bloody just do it!”

Buffy winced over her textbook. Spike talked in his sleep? 

Learning that soulless vampires dreamed was one thing, and all too human a thing to boot. Nightmares, even worse—and this one looked to be shaping up to one hell of a nightmare. But talking in his sleep about them took the cake.

“…End... my... torment.” He mumbled something else; a lengthy discourse as he turned his face into the pillow. She couldn’t make out much of it; just a few scattered words. “…Every day,” something something, “take me out of… world…”

/Oh, God./ He sounded completely overwrought, even enraged, voice throbbing with some kind of insane agony, and was he suicidal?

“Just kill me!”

Hands trembling a little, Buffy half-rose, books forgotten for the nonce. /Should I wake him up?/ It seemed like the hell of a nightmare he was having over there. Except… she wasn’t sure she could face him once he was awake. /How am I supposed to take care of a suicidal vampire?/

Besides, the last time she’d woken him mid-dream, he had so not reacted well. Maybe best to leave him be, let him deal with it on his own?

Except he was moaning again, whole body taut, rocking, a pillow clutched to his chest. Mumbled something else… and wait. Did he just say her name?

He was all but asking for help now, and she was at the bedside without thought. Was reaching out…

Before she could touch him he started awake to sit up like a striking snake. Propped himself on one hand to stare into the darkness, eyes wide and horrified… and crap, crap; he was shaking all over. “Oh,  _ God _ no,” he whispered, clearly petrified.  _ “Please _ , no.”

“Spike, what is it?” He sounded in so much pain that she couldn’t help it. She knelt on the bed, reached out to brush his back where he remained slightly turned away.

His reaction was immediate. He curled promptly away from her, threw himself back down with his head in his hands, groaned like she had torn his undead heart right out of his chest. “Oh, Christ…”

Now seriously worried, Buffy reached out hesitantly to lay her palm on his shoulder. As she had predicted, he tensed, though this time he didn’t bat her hand away. “Sorry. I didn’t mean…” She started to move away… and was surprised when he caught her hand, gripped it in his, held it so tightly over his shoulder that she felt her bones grind together a little. “Spike?” she asked softly.

A tremor ran through him, racking his entire body. When he spoke, his voice sounded lighter, without its usual low timber and gravitas; a ghost of itself. “Fuck; I can’t believe Dru was right.” His voice sounded like a creaky door, strained, bloodless. And then he laughed; a painful, mirthless laugh that sounded almost… self-mocking. “Turns out, Buffy, that bit they say, ‘everywhere you go, you take yourself with’? Thought I could change it this bloody time, but it’s true as hell.” Holy crap, he really was just  _ quaking _ . “Christ, I must be bug-shaggin’ mad.” He made a sound that was almost maybe a sob and released her hand, shoved his own through his hair. Clenched it there for a second like pulling at his scalp would fix something, then pulled in a deep, shaky breath. “‘M fine, Slayer. G’wan, leave me be. I’ll do.” His voice sounded… almost back to normal when he said it, but only to someone who hadn’t gotten to know him like she had in the last twenty-four hours.

He was so not okay. “You don’t sound fine.” For one thing, it had completely freaked her out that he had just called her by her name. He sounded… crazy unguarded. And for the record, the  _ way _ he had said her name unnerved her completely. “Spike, seriously, what’s wrong? Can I help?”

The shaking started back up again, but it was different this time, so it took her a moment to realize that he had started to laugh; long, drawn out, harsh chuckles that got louder and louder till he was wheezing uproariously, curled away from her on the bed. “Christfuck, Slayer,  _ no _ one can, least of all you. You’d kill me if you…” He shook his head against the pillow, and she thought for a moment she might have seen, once more, the glimmer of a tear on his eyelashes. “‘S fine. Nothin’ a whole soddin’ lot of bourbon won’t cure. Trip or fifteen to Willy’s, knock a few heads together, howl at the moon, yeah? Maybe write some bloody awful…” He cut off abruptly. “Stay turned on, tuned in, tuned out till it’s gone. It’ll pass.”

She shivered, afraid she was hearing him react, finally, to what had happened to him. A sort of belated reckoning; though why she would be mad about it was beyond her. “I can see why you might be… in pain and want to run away for a while, drink too much, not think—even if those aren’t, you know, the best coping mechanisms on the planet—but I’m not gonna be… mad at you for doing that. For one, I’ve kind of been there. I ran away from home, turned my back on every responsibility, tried to lose myself, so I have no place to judge from. And for another… I mean, the only thing I’m actually allowed to get mad about is you killing…” She bit her lip, hesitated. “That includes yourself, by the way,” she whispered.

He froze, shot her a glare. “Not soddin’ suicidal, Slayer.” His eyes jerked away, hard and burning. “Not yet, at any rate.”

She let out a breath, relief roaring through her. “I’m glad,” she whispered. “Because I’d be really mad if you were.” She thought she caught a faint hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth for her rough concern, felt triumph for getting him to break away, even briefly, from despair. “And as far as any other kind of killing, you can’t do that right now. Well,” she amended, “not without serious work, which I suppose you could if you really wanted…”

He interrupted her, voice tight with something that sounded like self-mockery, or maybe near-insanity. “What if I woke up one day and thought, ‘Maybe I’ll do it differently for a change, see what that’s like’?”

/Do it…/ “Huh?”

“Nothing.” He shook his head again, sounding very much at his wits’ end… and actually cuddled the blankets to his chest. “Leave me be, Buffy. I’m fine. Said it.”

She hesitated, but finally rose. Intruding on his process when he didn’t want it was the same thing as… invading. That wasn’t cool. “If you wanna talk…” she offered as she backed off the bed.   


“Yeah,” he whispered, voice trembling. Shook his head against the pillow again. “Christ. Came all the way to bloody California, still haven’t changed a whit, have I? Changed the girl, changed the scenery a bit, but still my same nancy sodding self at heart.” His voice descended to lower and lower registers as he dropped to mutters. “Still wishin’ for the same bloody impossible things.”

He was still muttering to himself as she returned to her homework, shaken. 

***

She was pretty sure Spike didn’t go back to sleep, for all he remained silent as the proverbial grave over there for the next couple of hours. Buffy buried everything in her Psych homework. It kept her busy, kept her from thinking too much (at least about non-homework-y things, which was a gift). At least, it helped with that for a couple of hours. Worrying about not having her Freshman Seminar homework on hand—or, really, the homework and books for any of her other classes—kept the remaining corners of her brain occupied with nice, surface-y things to worry about that did not involve Spike and his earth-shattering nightmares and apparent PTSD and how much she wished she could help him but was totally helpless to do so even though she knew all about nightmares and PTSD and… 

That was worry number one, but it was by far not even the only one she was avoiding with dry textbook-parsing. Others included more general concerns for once they departed this small, smelly haven; to whit, vampires with commando-chips in their brains and how those might or might not compare to vampires with souls, and what that might mean for her and emotions she was definitely  _ not _ having… And, of course, ye standard, looming possibility of an early apocalypse. Because why not have one in time for Christmas this year, instead of waiting for the standard pre-summer blowout like usual?

“What’s in your lesson, Slayer?”

Buffy almost jumped, hearing his voice, it had been so long since he’d said anything. He almost sounded back to normal again, though, and she badly wanted him to keep his equanimity. /Don’t make a big thing of it./ So she began reading aloud without pause, in the hopes, one, of maintaining both their equilibriums, and, two, of hushing him up so that she could sort of keep her mind on the task at hand. Too many interruptions and she would lose her tenuous train of thought when it came to this babble she was attempting to retain, which meant that all the anxieties she was trying very hard to tamp down would come barreling in in their place. That was simply not to be permitted.  _ “‘In social cognitive theory,’” _ she informed her resident vampire,  _ “‘people are agentic operators in their life course, not just onlooking hosts of internal mechanisms orchestrated by environmental events. They are sentient agents of experiences rather than simply undergoers of experiences…’” _

“Well, that’s obvious as hell. You mean there are those as think we all just sit about and let things happen to us, and don’t interact with the world at all?”

Buffy didn’t answer, just went on silently with the paragraph, unwilling to admit that Spike’s little bit of impromptu translation had actually helped her to understand what the heck she’d been trying to comprehend. She’d already reread this chapter intro about five times, but for some reason she was unable to concentrate tonight. 

It was irritating to admit it, but the theory she was reading tonight might actually have some bearing on her current conundrum; at least when it came to being an active Slayer on a hellmouth, anyway. 

For some reason, things were feeling weirdly breath-holdy right now, from her perspective, and she couldn’t for the life of her put a finger on why except that bad things always seemed to happen when the demon-world went wiggy in Sunnydale… and also… /Let’s be real. When Buffy Summers’ life goes all inside-out and upside-down, it usually means bad things are afoot and getting badder in the wide world of demon-sports. All part of the Slayer gig. My life is, like, connected to the vibe of the hellmouth or something. The town and me have a supernatural simpatico. When it goes haywire, my personal life goes kablooey too./

/Well, that’s the answer, then. I have to hold my life together and everything’ll be fine, right?/

“Read me some more, yeah?”

/Man, he must be really bored./ Or, more likely, he was trying super hard not to fall back to sleep. “Why don’t you watch TV or something?”

“You’re having a hard enough time concentrating without me listenin’ to somethin’ on telly. It’d compete with the one on the other side of the wall and the noise inside your own skull, and you’d get nothin’ done.”

Buffy seriously considered flipping him off, but restrained herself because in his own insulting way, the jerk vampire was actually trying to be considerate. “Interrupting me constantly doesn’t help me to concentrate. And anyway, how do you know I’m having a tough time?”

“Cause you’ve been readin’ the same soddin’ page for ten minutes, an’ your eyes haven’t scrolled any lower on it.”

Sometimes she kind of thought maybe he might watch her a little too closely with those creepy predator-observation skills of his. “Can’t you count your toes or something?” she snapped testily.

“Read me a bit more. What will it hurt?”

His patient tones pissed her off even more. Out of ammunition, she snapped out the next lines without any regard to their meaning.  _ “‘It is not just exposure to stimulation, but agentic action in exploring, manipulating, and influencing the environment that counts… Persons are neither autonomous agents nor simply mechanical conveyers of animating environmental influences…’” _

“Who the bloody hell is this sod? Statin’ the obvious once is bad enough. Repeatin’ it  _ ad nauseum _ is just wankin’ to sell somethin’.”

“Well, I have to read it to get the grade, okay?”

Spike rolled his eyes. “What’s it for?”

Was he stupid? “Psych,” she reminded him, as if speaking to a three-year-old. 

“No, I mean, do you have to write an essay on this bit, or is it only for an exam?”

She frowned, wondering just what the hell he was getting at. “Test. The essay’s on the next theory… um…” She flipped restlessly through the book. “Cognitive Behavioral…”

“Read the first and last lines of each paragraph. If you don’t understand what they’re getting’ at, skim the middle bits till you do, and move the bloody hell on. Whoever wrote this thing likes to hear the sound of their own voice. Either that, or the person they cited did; or they’re wanking off a teacher who was in love with that person, or were so far up someone’s arse otherwise tryin’ to get points they never came out again. Either way, doesn’t mean you need to join ‘em.” Buffy gaped at him, and he shrugged one shoulder, waved a dismissive hand. “No need to read every word, pet. Not unless someone’s tellin’ you you need to  _ know _ every word. An’ that goes for the rest of the soddin’ thing too, or you’ll never get through school. Not with any sleep, anyway.”

Was… Was William the Bloody giving her advice on how to get through  _ college? _ “Wh…”

“Trust me, luv. You don’t need the headache.”

Buffy opened her mouth, dying to ask. Abruptly shut it again when she saw the shutters come down in his eyes. 

He didn’t want her to know. And prodding, poking him, making demands… It was so not something she wanted to do with him right now. Any kind of invasion was… It would be… “Alrighty-then,” she heard herself say, and turned back to the text.

She had to admit, though, that his advice was good stuff. She got through the chapter in record time, with significantly less of that feeling like her brain was stuffed with cotton, started taking notes for her essay within an hour. She also had to admit that without all that excess info from earlier in the chapter swirling around in her head, she was able to keep the essay pertinent to the subject at hand, and even to inject stuff from the rest of the chapter that seemed to be useful without any unnecessary clutter slithering into the fold. 

The whole time she was scribbling her notes (later to be transcribed into an actual paper whenever she could get near a computer lab again), she found herself vaguely amazed at the companionable quality to the silence in the room; especially considering how, just a little while ago, Spike had been all Mr. Flipped-Out. Though she would lay bets that, as the shadows lengthened and the lamps came on, Spike was still watching her with that unfathomable look on his face. 

She also didn’t ask about that. She really didn’t want to know. But she found that, strangely… it didn’t bother her.

At one point, though, as the afternoon lengthened into evening, she broke the easy quiet without thinking to mutter the question to herself. “Sort out? No. Define? No…”

“Parse?” Spike suggested softly, as if reading her mind.

“Parse,” she agreed as softly, and wrote it down. Then her head jerked up, and she blinked at him. “Wait, what?”

“Here to serve, Slayer.”

There was that strange look again. A patient, almost waiting look… but there was a sort of… burning heat at the very back of it; that odd intensity, and… “Oh,” she heard herself answer. “Um… thanks.” 

/Maybe it was a joke. Obviously it was a joke. Especially coming from  _ him _ , totally a joke…/

/Essay. Write your essay./  
  
Eventually, though, the essay notes were wrapped, and she came to the realization that, one, she was out of distractions for her currently-overactive brain, and two, her butt was numb, her calves jumping, and her entire body aching from twenty-four hours of unaccustomed inactivity and the molded imprint of the uncomfortable chair. “I need to jog or something.”

“No doubt,” he answered, watching her. “Might want to stretch a bit myself. Goin’ stir-crazy in this dive.” 

She didn’t want to tell him that she was having a paradoxically frustrating experience right now; wanting, needing to get away from him for a little bit, to clear her head without him following her, but also terrified of letting him out of her sight. Thus she found herself more than a little relieved when, once they were out in the relatively cool, fresh air of the walkway and out of the stuffy, stale-smoke-smelling room, he merely stood by the rail, hands on the peeling top bar in the rising moonlight, and not-quite-watched her with glittering eyes as the blue light washed over his pale features. He stretched out his arms to a cracking, full-length tautness, cording his every muscle in a way that briefly arrested her eyes, arched his back a little, rounding up his shoulders, hissed a little, rocked his body with knees locked, and gave her a little nod with his chin without entirely looking her way. “I’ll stay right here, pet. Go on.”

Bizarrely relieved that he wasn’t going to try to pace her, she nodded wordlessly and headed away to his left to jog the length of the catwalk; around the whole building until he was a pale blob on the far side of the semi-quad, only his white burst of ringlets visible as a fuzzy beacon above the dark magic trick of his black shirt and jeans vanishing into the growing gloom. A bright spark of an ember moved up and down as he smoked the second half of his carefully-conserved cigarette, slow and methodical, pensive even… and even from here, graceful.

An unexpected bright spot in the dark, known anywhere; one that did not resolve from shadows or seem a part of them, but was distinct. Always distinct, and always there, just on the edge of her awareness.

Maybe if someone came at them, at least they would have something to do. Someone to fight. She would almost welcome a fight right now, she was so anxious. Sitting still was the worst thing, in her book. Anathema, a horror. The only times she had ever sat still she had been sunk in depression; on the bus on the way to LA, and in the vast city, squatting in her dive of an apartment there for hours on end, blanking out on everything so that she didn’t have to think about anything. Who she had been, where she had come from, or a sword in a chest and blood on her hands and eyes suddenly filled with recognition and a soul and confusion and love, and…

‘Disassociation’, her psych text called it, all those long periods of lost time and stillness. It scared her now to think of how many hours, days even, she had lost after Angel and Acathla. She couldn’t go back there again, couldn’t court that kind of self-destruction. She had to keep moving or she would die. She had tasted death, and…

/God, why couldn’t he have fought me? At least if we could fight we wouldn’t be still./ She had wanted that back. Wanted him back. The simplicity of it. Her best enemy. No questions about it. No thought. 

Except now there always would be. Her best enemy had become… something else. /My best… frenemy, now?/

She found herself still again, gripping the rail across from him, a vast, dark, empty gulf separating her from a man who had been easy evil just two days ago. Less than; and who now stood watching her as if he were waiting for something, and she just… She couldn’t…

Couldn’t think. Couldn’t stay still to think. Thinking was dying. 

Coming back was a reluctant thing, but a necessary one. She made up her bed, wordless; a pallet on the floor of comforter turned upside down toward the carpet in case the two worst things in the place would meet and cancel each other out, and in the hopes that the inside of the thing would be cleaner. Grabbed one of the pillows and tossed it down. She could not spend another night on that damn chair. 

“I can take the floor tonight, Slayer.”

Buffy didn’t look at him. “Shut up, Spike,” she cut him off irritably, and turned for the bathroom. She was determined to regain some sort of high ground here. It was necessary. It was right. It was…

The only thing left to do.

When she returned from the dingy little restroom Spike was hovering over her makeshift boudoir, a bundle of sheet in his hands. He actually looked uncertain. “It’s no trouble, luv. ‘M a sight better. Only fair you have a turn…”

“Spike, I swear to God I’ll punch you if you don’t stay in that bed.”

He grunted, clearly affronted at her threat. Which was fair, and she kind of felt bad for being such a bitch. /What kind of jerk threatens to hit someone who can’t even hit back?/ 

“Fine.” And to her shock he threw his ball of sheet right in her face.

She pulled it off, which took some doing, as it had basically tented over her entire head; yanked it down and stared incredulously at him, her bangs standing on end from static and probably looking even more ridiculous than a day and change of bed-head and no brush had already made her. “Are you serious right now?”

He shrugged at her. “No need to get shirty, Slayer.” And he tossed her a faint grin. “I’m easy.”  
  
Lowering her new bundle of sheet, she shook her head in confusion. /Um, okay./ “What does that mean? I don’t get your Britishisms. I’m just pretty sure it doesn’t mean to you what it means to me.” /Or at least I’m really praying it doesn’t, because otherwise, that was a pass, which it just can’t be. It really can’t. Please let it not be a pass./

“Think what you like, pet.”

Biting her lip, Buffy turned away and busied herself with lofting the sheet away from herself from one edge to catch enough air to spread it over her makeshift nest as a sort of prophylactic against whatever might be on the bedspread, then flung herself down on the floor with her back to the infuriating vampire who most definitely did not unnerve her in the slightest. 

He in no way scared her. Not even a little bit. 

It would just be easier if he was more evil, was all.

***

“They’re that scared of the bitch?”

“You should’ve heard him, boss? Hell, you should’ve heard both of ‘em. Goddamn bartender was shakin’ in his boots. And he’s mostly human! The Folgal acted like she was a fucking Prazhnahan…”

Razor cut off Craw’s whining little diatribe with a swift slash of his clawed hand. “Shut the fuck up and let me think.” 

Thinking took all of three seconds. “The snitch bartender confirmed she lives out of town now, though, right? At the college?”

“Yeah. Said it doesn’t matter, though, because she hunts every other day, and…”

Razor shut him up with a punch to the lumpy-ass throat. “If she’s been gone, if she’s been known to take a siesta before, then the town’s open. We go in, we set up, we have the numbers. She can’t dig us out once we’re entrenched. She’s still just one fucking bitch.” He turned to his back to the bulging-eyed, gasping coward behind him, lifted his voice to the waiting crew behind him, all jittering with eagerness to plunge in and start pillaging the wide-open burgh. “Okay, Hellions, let’s do this!”

They swung aboard their mules, gunned their engines. The pulsing evil of the hellmouth called like a siren-song of lust and death. They all wanted it, were all hard as hell for it. “We’re gonna fuck that town into the ground, take it six ways to Saturday night. If the Slayer shows and tries to stop us, we’ll turn her into our own personal toy, because I think we’ve found a new home.” Broad, toothy, feral grins. Razor answered them as ferociously. “Any asshole I see holding back is dead. Any one of you holds back around the bitch doesn’t get a taste.” He swung aboard his own mule, gunned it. “Let’s ride.”

Like a breaking wave, roaring, unadulterated evil descended into Sunnydale.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
How about that thinkin' some thoughts, Buffy? And how about that having some better dreams, Spike m'boy? And how's about we just keep that pager off, yo?  
  
I'm greedy.   
I'm just sayin'. Leave these two alone for another, what? 18 more hours, and voila. They work fast when there's nothin' else doing. The pager can go to hell. The Hellions'll still be there tomorrow... Heh. (I say now that I've finally got 'em actually coming to town to wreak said hell.)  
  
(Psych text quotes taken from “Experimental Child Psychology”, ed. Sujata Mittal, 2005, blah blah blah and yadda.)  



	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to be a bit behind here!  
So... I love this chapter. Like, I LOVE this chapter. So much subtle stuff going on here for Buffy, and Spike doing his thing where he pushes her to see her stuff so she admits to it. Someone be sinkin' fast here in this motel room and is swiftly beginning to have a tough time ignoring that she's in a river in Egypt.
> 
> Also, **Content Warning**, some stuff in here about remembering past traumas... but in a fic like this that's to be expected, so note that under the first set of stars will be one of those conversations, if I hope handled quietly and rather intimately (or at least that's the air I hope to continue to conjure between these two in this liminal space). You can skip it if you wish to head straight to the next set of stars and our usual 'what are the Hellions up to' moment (which is also not so pretty, btw, now they've landed in town, because that's getting real now, too), if you wish.
> 
> oh. Some dialogue from "the Pack" in here.

“Was proud of you, earlier.”

Despite her earlier internal promise, Buffy rolled halfway over to face him at this, stunned. “What? Of what?”

He was still watching her, lying on his side; like she was his new hobby or something. “Was nice to see you taking charge for a bloody change.”

“Taking charge?”

“With Red,” he extrapolated patiently into the darkness. “That lot push you around a fair bit, for a girl who’s meant to be their leader. You know that, right?” A strange note of frustration had leaked into his voice by now, lending a sort of jagged edge to his words. “Never understood why the bloody hell you put up with it.”

Buffy looked away, down at her hands. “They care about me. They love me. They only want what’s best for me.” 

A short silence greeted her answer. “And you’re the sodding boss,” he answered firmly then. “You’ve saved their lives loads of times, and without you they’d have no reason to be here. I’d think they’d’ve learned their places by now.”

She would  _ not _ cry. But she needed him to stop. “It’s not that easy, Spike.” 

“It  _ should _ be,” he pushed on. “You’re the bleedin’  _ Slayer _ , Buffy.” It was the third time he’d called her by her name, but this time she started in shock at the way he said it, the almost tender note underneath the fierceness. “Not them. What you said to Red is right. You should have the final word about vamps in this damn town. And when it comes to your life… well.” He shrugged and looked away, affecting a sudden, studious disregard of her feelings, as if aware he’d gotten too close, seen too deeply. “All I’m sayin’ is it doesn’t seem so much like love, sometimes, the way they order you about.” His gaze came back then, as if he couldn’t force himself to stay away, and he was right back to eyeing her in that too-seeing way of his. “Makes you tired, luv,” he whispered. “Can see it. Bein’ loved like that’s a cage. Hard to feel anything but brassed off about it when it’s bein’ used to control you.”

Buffy looked down at her hands, unable to really refute the charge aloud. 

Her lack of response seemed to infuriate him. “It’s  _ your _ life, pet. You your own woman, or not?”

That was it, and dammit, he’d gotten way too stinking close to the problem. “I’ve made mistakes,” she heard herself whisper in answer. “I need to let them… hold me accountable… when it comes to certain things…”

A rustle and flurry of blanket sounded from above her as he pushed up to a near-sitting position. “Oh, bollocks! Because of soddin’ Angelus an’ that rot?”

She didn’t reply. Couldn’t, and had to fight back the tears. Why was she letting herself be vulnerable with  _ him _ , of all people? And about  _ this? _

Clearly he took her non-answer for confirmation. “Oh, bloody Christ, luv, that’s such fucking bullshit! You don’t deserve this sort of policing! And to think you’re all but  _ asking _ for it from  _ them; _ as if they’ve any greater credentials in their lives than you have…” He sounded amazingly enraged on her behalf. It kind of blew her mind. “You made a sodding judgment call as a goddamned adolescent, and you were manipulated into it on top of all that!” 

Her head jerked up in shock. “I wasn’t…”

“Yes, you bloody well were, but putting that aside for the moment, one might think with all that that you’re actually  _ better _ equipped to make such decisions, going forward, not less so!”

“Wh…” That thought had honestly never occurred to her. 

“So then why,” Spike ranted on, sounding incensed, “does all that mean you shouldn’t be permitted to trust yourself with any other judgment call thereafter, for the rest of your bleedin’ life?”

“I…” Faltering, Buffy frowned inwardly. Her brain felt bombarded by messages that ran counter to everything she had been led to believe, and to trust. Namely, everyone else, and not herself. Never again herself.

Spike’s expression turned thunderous, and if it were possible for a vampire to suffuse with outrage, he was doing his best impression of it. “Don’t you get the buggerin’ chance to learn and grow and be your own adult woman and all that shite?”

If she said it… it would be real. The whole discussion. “Not if… I keep making the same mistakes,” she whispered anyway.

The silence that fell then was like a heavy fire blanket, quenching all conversation. 

Spike didn’t speak for what felt like an eternity, but when he did, his tones were exceptionally bleak.  _ “‘That which hath the look of the same cloth when one is at a distance from the clothier’s stall will oft feel much different under the fingers; one made poorly, damaged and with shoddy workings, if temperate of color, and one, tho’ patterned garishly, soft as distant silks. And lying beneath it, also, oftimes, two very different lovers can be found e’en when two woven of the same skein are found in divers houses.’” _

Broken completely loose from her blue study by this completely unexpected descent into quotation, Buffy blinked into the darkness. “Okay, what?” He hadn’t even sounded like Spike there for a minute.

“Nothing, Slayer. Get some rest.”

Like she could sleep now.  
  
Between the physical restlessness of a Slayer bound by too little physical exertion and trammeled in close quarters for too many hours, and the emotional distress of things best kept denied, Buffy was a tossing, turning, wakeful mess. Eventually she rose and moved toward the TV, well aware that Spike wasn’t sleeping either, for all he had been awake with her most of the damned day. “What’s on this time of day, anyway?” Usually around now she was either patrolling, studying, or—in rare and zealously-guarded moments—sleeping, guiltily. Watching TV was a luxury she was seldom afforded of an evening.

He grunted acknowledgment of her call for mindless companionship. “Judging from the last couple nights at the Watcher’s flat, I’d say not a whole bloody lot. Late night shite, yeah? Leno an’ that sort. Makes me miss Carson. That man was a soddin’ riot.” His voice went a bit lighter then. “Heard Angelina Jolie was meant to be on Letterman tonight, though…”

Buffy rolled her eyes at the dial on the aging box. “Two guesses why you wanna watch  _ her _ interview.”

“Oi! She’s a right interestin’ bird.”

“Uhuh. Brunette, dangerous, wears a vial of blood around her neck, is about as crazy as any vamp...” To be fair, Buffy kind of admired Angelina Jolie’s ‘give no fucks’ attitude, but she was so not going to go there with Spike, of all people… and actually, she was kind of ready to be irritated if the vampire showed overt admiration when the actress walked onto the screen. Not that she cared or anything, but it was the principle of the thing. Or something. 

The TV came slowly to life, expanding from a single, horizontal, blinding white line to a full picture with obvious reluctance. Buffy fiddled with the ‘chan-up’ and ‘chan-down’ buttons for a sec till she found Letterman, who was doing his stand-up segment, then moved away to settle into her blankies. ‘…For the recent search for the missing girl. Even the Hells Angels are involved in the search, which is kind of nice of them, when you think about it, trying to clean up their image. I mean, they found Altamont…’

Buffy shot back to her feet, cranked the TV off. The white line reappeared, shrank to a bright dot, and vanished with a subsonic  _ blip _ . The silence carried, this time heavy with resurgent unease.

“Doubt they’ll come here, luv.” 

Buffy was surprised, actually, at the calm lack of anxiety in Spike’s voice at the reminder of things motorcycle-related. “The Hells Angels?” she quipped, trying for chipper.

Spike did not dignify that with a response. 

With a sigh, she returned to her pallet, sat with legs crossed. “What if they do? After what you said they do a town when they show up…” She shook her head grimly. “And this is the hellmouth. If anything’s gonna go wrong here, it will.”

“Well, sure. You got that, ‘connected to an all-powerful evil’ thing here. Everyone gets all juiced up; even you, I’d imagine, Slayer, to fight us when we are.” 

She threw him a startled look in the gloom. 

“What, you think all vamps go around makin’ fledges and leavin’ ‘em high and dry like this everywhere else, without showin’ ‘em the ropes? It’s a soddin’ plague, here, is what it is.” He sneered, clear disgust coloring his tones. “Worse’n minions, these. No training whatsoever, no one to control ‘em…”

Buffy was even more startled at this little diatribe. “They can be  _ controlled?” _

Her question earned her a sour look from an apparently super-offended vamp. “What do you think a nest is  _ for _ , Buffy?” he demanded sternly, as if he had thought better of her, and dang… he had just used her name again. It was… weird. “You make a fledge, you keep ‘em close, train ‘em up, do right by ‘em. If you’re a vamp worth your lineage, that is.” He flipped a hand out toward the beckoning night beyond the closed curtains. “That lot are a bunch of cretins. Fledges making fledges, mindless as worms. Hate everything about it.”

/Well, wow./ Who knew vampires had, like, customs and beliefs and… social mores and stuff? “I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, well.”

He sounded kind of bitter about it, so she essayed quickly to change the subject. It was too much food for thought anyway. “So… the hellmouth vibe makes demons crazier than normal? Like, if I went somewhere else they’d be more chill?” It sounded like a faerie tale. Demons were demons, right? 

Except, when she’d lived in LA—both times—things had been more spread out, less daily and pressing. Granted she’d not been out looking for trouble, but still. You had to really look for demon activity to find it down there. It wasn’t just there on the surface, or even bubbling just below it like it was here in Sunnydale, with the human populace studiously looking the other way and developing convenient, repeated amnesia till they got whiplash from it. It was totally underground in LA; like its own little hidden demon economy. 

Evil had for sure been afoot in the land of her birth, and judging from what they had heard through the grapevine from Cordelia, Angel Investigations still found plenty to do, but it sounded almost like recently they had started helping even some of the more inoffensive demons--or at least part-demons--as much as they helped humans to get away from them, which was bizarre and weird and Buffy had avoided thinking too much about it before now. Well, mostly she had avoided thinking about anything involving Angel, but based on what Spike had been saying lately…

/ _ So _ way too much food for thought./ “So these Hellion jerks want to come here because wild and crazy hellmouth vibe, but they mostly stick to other fun demon-y towns cuz the hellmouth has a Slayer on it?”

“Well,  _ this _ one does.”

Buffy felt something like a bolt of cold lightning shoot up her spine. “This… what?”  
  
“This hellmouth. They mostly party at the others as don’t have a Slayer on ‘em.” At her look of incomprehension, “You didn’t think this was the only hellmouth, did you pet?”

“I… I never…”

“Doorways like this to other dimensions all over. Big sodding cosmic hotspots. This one’s just the hottest of late.”

“Oh.” God, how much more had the Council never told her?

/Wait… does  _ Giles  _ know?/ 

Definitely one of many things to ask her Watcher later. “So, they, um, avoid it here because I’m around, and wreck every other town instead. But if I wasn’t here, they’d be here in a minute.”

“Reckon so.” Spike made a strange sound in the dark; like an angry cat. “Well, I dunno. If you’d gone down to that sod Lothos in LA, most like some new chit would’ve been called here, since Nest was rearin’ his ugly-arsed face along about then. Way I’ve come to figure it, Slayer gets called wherever a Master’s about who’s powerful enough to tug on the strings so the Line takes notice and spits one out nearby. Hence LA got you when Lothos got too strong, even though that shitehole’s no hellmouth; for all it’s got those lawyer boys. Even they don’t rate a Slayer. Have to make do with Peaches.”

Buffy stared at him through the darkness, amazed. She had never thought of that, and as far as she knew, Giles never had either. Or, if he had, he for sure hadn’t brought it up to her. “That… makes a ton of sense,” she whispered. A thought struck her then. “You don’t think the Mayor would’ve been enough to make sure someone would’ve been Called here?”

She was answered with a dismissive grunt. “Think it has to be a vamp, pet. You’re tied to us, we’re tied to you, innit?”

She had nothing to say to that, because deep in her heart, she knew it was true. When Merrick had come to her, he had never mentioned the other demons; not even once. It was all vampires, all the time, with him. Later, after working with Giles for a while, she had rationalized that to a sort of, ‘Maybe Merrick was priming me to focus on only vamps because he knew I’d be battling Lothos and his boys’… but now she wondered. The Vampyr Book mostly focused on that relationship too; the relationship between vamps and the Slayer. The part Giles had read to her back into the beginning had stuck to that dichotomy as well.  _ ‘For as long as there have been vampires, there's been the Slayer. One girl in all the world, a Chosen One.’ _ Words that had once haunted her, terrified her, weighed heavy on her soul, even killed her… but now they were a duty, an identity. Hers. A  _ raison d’etra _ . Part of her being.

And… they made no mention of demonkind in a wider sense, save at the beginning. They didn’t say, ‘for as long as there have been demons’, but ‘for as long as there have been vampires’. The only time it had really ever mentioned other demons was at the beginning, when it had rattled on and on about the genesis of the vampires; how demons had once ruled the world, but got shoved out when… what was it? ‘Mortal animals’, the humans, took over. 

/They saw  _ us _ as the animals, not the other way around. And now we look at them that way./ She remembered her Anth text talking about how the settlers had thought of the Native Americans as animals, because it had made it easier for them to massacre them if they thought of them as less than human. Was this all basically the same thing? /Like we all just call each other animals so we can kill each other and keep the real estate? Is that how it works?/

The Big Book of Slayerness also ranted about how the Old Ones had left behind their mark on the world with magicks, and that a bunch of their descendants got trapped here. When they were fighting the Mayor Giles had said that none of the demons she fought were ‘pure’ the way the Old Ones had been, but that the vampires were the only true hybrids. 

For the first time she really wondered what that meant, ‘hybrid’. The book had talked about ‘a human form possessed’, but Kakistos and the Master hadn’t looked all that human; certainly not enough to pass as human in a crowd. They hadn’t looked like they could shake off their game-faces at all, or at least they had had certain features that made Buffy wonder now if they could even have switched to human guises. The Master’s nose and mouthful of serrated shark-teeth, Kakistos’ feet and hands… Total full-time demon stuff going on there. So how did that work when it came to being some kind of ‘covert demon infiltrator’?

/No stealth-mode for these old guys. And the older they were, the less stealth, because those two? Really not mixy. They were pretty much just straight-up demons. So, what are we talking about, ‘possessed a human form’, anyway? Like, has two legs and two arms and one head?/ 

That covered a lot of territory. 

The Book had been serious about the vamp-progenitor being the last demon to leave this ‘reality’, this dimension; that vamps had been sort of an Old One parting gift. That he ‘fed off of a human, mixed their blood’. Which, well… hybridization, sure. Making vamp-babies, just like they still did, all the time. You needed a human to do it; a place to put the baby demon. Which, when Buffy thought about it, urgh, that you used your food as breeding cows too. But that word, ‘possessed’… 

She was starting to really wonder about that word. 

‘Mixing their blood’ left a lot of leeway when it came to the whole ‘possessing’ the human thing. They had always put so much currency in the soul part, but if there was still a kind of soul there to experience things the way a soul did, then they weren’t really ‘soulless’; just different. And as to the rest; what it if wasn’t just possessing their ‘form’? Clearly vampires possessed a lot more. Human memories, their emotions, obviously their bodies. Their whole life.

Which for the first time begged the question, what made up a person? Buffy had once thought the emotions were gone, vanished with the human soul, but Spike had just proved that false. The demon could feel, which meant it felt emotions about the human memories it carted around, could probably even feel empathy toward human lives if it stopped to think about it. The way Spike had talked about hunting, it was clear that he avoided doing so because it didn’t fit his needs, would get in the way, which also implied that he was capable. Obviously he could feel love, fear, pain, sorrow, loss…

If all that was still there… then that meant that person they used to be… Were they really actually gone? Or were they just living on in a different form, maybe preserved like some sort of bug trapped in the demon’s amber;shackled, in a way, to the demon’s life-force, so they couldn’t die all the way when their body… stopped? 

If they still had enough pieces in place to be considered effectively human as well as demon, then they could not be counted as ‘gone’, or ‘lost’, or ‘dead’, were not actually a copy or a relic or a ‘guise’ in the way that she had been taught. Human soul or no, they were alive in their own way, as a part of the demon’s experience, feeling everything with them. 

/Is that what ‘undead’ really means?/

God, what a thought. It would mean that so much of what she had been taught, so much of what was in the Book, was completely wrong. That the vampires she dusted really were hybrids in a true sense, and that the human they had taken over hadn’t actually truly died until she staked them. They had exchanged a soul, sure, but were essentially just ‘on hold’ till that moment when she finally separated them. Which meant who knew if she was giving them rest, liberating them from a captor to rejoin that original soul, or if they were used to the demonic one and happy to still be semi-alive and kicking. 

Spike sure didn’t seem to resent being all demoned up. Not in the way Angel did, anyway. /But you’d think he would resent it, if his human side was, well… a good person. Because being hitched to a demon… something evil…/

Except… she was starting to think ‘evil’ was kind of a relative term. There was Angelus-Evil, The Master Evil, which was EVIL in all-caps… And then there was Spike-evil, which was sort of mid- to low-grade evil, depending on circumstances. He was a killer, sure, but give him a chance to torture and he got bored, would rather watch TV. His idea of torture was, like, a lot less… operatic than Angelus’. Not that she underestimated him and what he could do, would do just for kicks sometimes, and with less feeling than she had for swatting a fly… but he tended more toward careless violence, or violence for the immediate, chaotic fun of it, and less for that creepy, stalking thing his grandsire had done. Most of the really dangerous stuff he had perpetrated before, in Sunnydale at least, had been for… /Well, for love. To save Drusilla. The thing with kidnapping Angel, and the Order of Taraka, and coming after me to use my blood for her… Really, it was all about taking care of his crazypants ex./ 

Which was, of course, the same reason he had turned around and helped Buffy, in the end, against his own ‘family’. /I’ll say one thing for you, you weirdo. You’re consistent./

Spike’s motivations weren’t the same as someone like Angelus, who wanted to break people and destroy everyone and everything, drag everyone through their worst nightmares. Spike wanted to party hard, make quick kills, get the job done… and, bizarrely, also to take care of the people he loved. He was some kind of weird contradiction in terms. He was so random, and he was…

/You’re  _ loyal _ . You might even be  _ trustworthy _ . You’re for sure at least predictable. I know what to expect from you./ And wasn’t that a thought, that in a weird way she could trust Spike’s demonside to be what she was ready for him to be. 

In comparison, Angelus… He was unpredictable, inhuman. The things he thought to do weren’t the sort of things any human being would think of next. /God./ Buffy tried to imagine Angelus with a commando chip in his head, and knew, in that moment, that if her ex’s demon had come to Giles’ door, begging for help under a burning sun, she would have shut it in his face. Maybe even staked him. Because unlike Spike, Angelus would have found a way to destroy them all, chip or no chip. 

Spike had a kind of… whatever. Thieves’ honor or something. Unlike his grandsire, he cared what people thought of him on some level, and he gave his word and kept it. 

Also, he was basically a giant doofus sometimes. And okay, sure. He could be hugely irritating, but under the surface…

Buffy hated to admit it, but she had come to realize that there was maybe an actual nice guy under there, peeping shyly out through the jagged eaves. A guy she kind of wanted to get to know more. Which was so not a thing she was supposed to admit to, but there was this insistent tattoo in her mind now, a desperate need to solve the mystery. ‘Who is William, really? Who  _ was _ he, who can he be…’ And that was seriously dangerous, it was…

It was against the rules. Because one thing the Book really had harped on, one way or the other, was that vamps were the only evil the Slayer was meant to focus on. That the vampire was the insidious danger; the stealth killer that could come back, sneak in, find those it had once loved…

She got that. She had to be the weapon. The first and last line of defense. She couldn’t falter or fail. Without a weapon against them, vamps would have taken over. Humans would have lost, died out. Which, to be fair, would have been kind of bad for the vamps, but maybe logic wasn’t a strong suit of the Old One who’d made them? /Except I guess in a way vamps were, like, a weapon made specifically to come after humans. Like the Terminator. So maybe once the job was done… it didn’t matter?/

That kind of sucked for the vamps, with the starvation and the no human to make babies with. /And, seriously, what is even happening to my brain today?/

But… well, she supposed considering the stealth-Terminator thing and the last-ditch weapon aspect in an ongoing war, it made sense that the Slayer was made specifically to fight vamps. For sure the Book hadn’t said a single thing about the duty of the Slayer to fight anything but vamps; like the Council had sort of added the rest of demonkind on as a sort of ‘PS’ later on. And, okay. She felt other demons, sure, especially big bads…  _ now _ . But they had taken serious training to for her to sense them. And on the Richter Scale of Slayer-arousal, not even the Mayor had gotten her short hairs all ripply like even a fledgling vamp. Other senses, sure… but not…

It wasn’t the same thing at all. And she had always felt vampires, even when she hadn’t known what it was she had been feeling, had disregarded the sensation as ‘chills’ or ‘a shivery flash’, tried to ignore it and move on with her life. With familiarity, with years of acuity they were all around her. She could point to them in the dark, with her eyes closed. Half of her life, sometimes, felt like just waiting for the next vampire to come around, make her actual reality spring into being, give her that roaring sense of vitality, so she could remember what really living was like.

/You are the reason I was made. You’re the reason I am what I am. The reason I’m still alive, the reason I’m here… And you were always there…/ 

And to think she had once wanted it gone. Wanted to be ‘normal’, whatever that meant. God. The thought of losing that feeling, now, that other sense—the intensity of it, the certitude that she could just go out, find it, and feel so ferociously  _ alive _ —sounded abruptly like losing a limb, or like going voluntarily back into that gray, dead, colorless world she had inhabited briefly in LA after Acathla. And when it came to who made her feel the most vividly herself…

“Are you… upset that you came back?” The second the words were out, she wanted them back. /What the hell am I  _ doing? _ / “I mean, I would totally understand if you were, with the chip and the commando thing and… Them. Being stuck here like this with me…”

“Buffy…”

She shivered once more at the way he said her name. “Sorry, it was a stupid question.” Shook her head, shook the question off. “Anyway, I know if they come you’ll be fighting for you, not this town or anything else. It’s not like I expect… anything. I know this isn’t home to you. That you’re just passing through again, and the minute you get that thing out of your brain you’ll go back to your life. But it makes me wonder sometimes, since you keep coming back…”

“Buffy, you need to stop. You’re making a fool of yourself.”

“I know,” she whispered, and her throat was tight, and probably she should go lock herself in the bathroom, but instead she kept talking like an idiot. “It’s just… earlier you said there were visiting religious nuts, and not-wannabe ritualists, and residents, and good tourists, and then party-crashers like the Hellions, and… I just wondered when you said it where do you fit in on that list. Because it doesn’t seem like you fit in at all based on the way you ran it down.” She felt strangely outside herself, like she was floating a little above her own head. “Are you… a resident now, part-time, or…”

His voice, when it interrupted hers, was slow, pained… and amused, which hurt even worse. “Was just here to kill you, fix Dru and leave. That went all to shite. Then you sp…” He halted abruptly. “Then you dropped a sodding organ on me, and I was stuck here with all that shite went down with Angelus. Never wanted to be a bloody local, never expected to stay. Somethin’ keeps bringing me back, though, yeah? Red and her spells, as if I couldn’t have found a witch somewhere else. The bleedin’ Amara legend…” His whole face twisted, visible despite the gloom. “When I heard the Gem might be here I thought the irony was gonna kill me. Wanted in and out fast as I could go, before you ever heard I was here, but then I found the sodding thing and all the sudden all I could bloody well think about was takin’ you on again… and ‘afore I knew it I was tagged by those soldier boys, and…” He shrugged uncomfortably, looked away. “Now I’m stuck here till I figure out how to fix it. Spent as much time here of late as I have anywhere else. Place bloody well haunts me. Guess that makes me a resident. So, yeah,” he went on, defiantly now, and his eyes returned to hers; blazed blue like the flames in the hottest part of a fireplace in midwinter. “Reckon I’m a soddin’ local now, heaven help me. Not that it will.”

He sounded so stunned by his own admission that it kind of floored her. “But that didn’t even make you a tourist before, right? You weren’t here for the hellmouthy power or some Aurelian ritual…”

“Hated Nest. Fucking sod. Hated all that shite, no matter how hard the old bent bitch and Angelus tried to beat the family drivel into my head as a fledge. Didn’t need religion as a human and I bloody well don’t need it now. And the sodding money never did me and Dru a lick of good, so why should I care?”

“Money?”

“Never mind. Reason your sweetie-bear could afford a big mansion on the bloody hill, yeah?”

/Wait, what?/ 

“Didn’t come here for the bleedin’ hellmouth, any of those times, Slayer. Didn’t come to be the Annoying One’s plaything, and I sure the bloody hell didn’t come for the ambience. I came here for  _ you _ .” 

Something inside her flipped around, turned exquisitely, painfully wobbly. “For…”

“Heard about you, innit? Heard there was a new Slayer in town, and a hell of a one. That she’d taken out that old git, even. Seemed if I could take you out that’d be like putting the star on the top of the tree that was my soddin’ fine reputation, yeah?” He didn’t smile, eyes incredibly intense on hers. “Came to kill you because you were the best.”

The thing flopping around inside her twisted painfully and went still like it had been staked. She had somehow almost forgotten. “Yeah. Right. It seems… like such a long time ago, somehow.” And why did it feel so hard to breathe right now, thinking about it? /Stupid. You  _ know _ he wants to kill you. That if he had the chip out he would want to fight you again. That…/

“Course, that was before I found out what you were.”

Her eyes rose of their own accord, and she met his before she could stop herself. “What I…”

“Not something to hang a reputation on. Not somethin’ you kill and move on and feel high on life for doin’ it, like the others.” His voice turned almost pensive. “‘F I did that, I wouldn’t be able to come back around and fight you again; or even just watch you take down some other poor bugger in the meantime.” His eyes went molten, his tones to something that sounded like dark, rumbly lava. “And I do mean to dance with you again, Slayer. Make no mistake…”

/Oh!/ God. He wanted…

Something warm spread inside her; flowed out, from somewhere in the center of her being, out to her fingertips, her toes, the top of her head. Something that had something to do with the intensity and the insane, smoldering, flashpoint heat in his voice; the hunger there… and the potential. 

“Someday,” he went on, soft and low and filled with deadly promise, “we’ll dance again, pet. Just you an’ me. And we’ll know for sure.”

“Know…” God, her mouth was dry. And why were her hands shaking so hard?

“Yeah,” he answered, as if she was agreeing with him. “Then, we’ll finally know.”

He went silent then, and Buffy found she had exactly nothing whatsoever to say. 

Somehow, she had the most incredibly terrifying feeling that Spike wasn’t talking about fighting anymore. And that thought scared the shit out of her.

***

“Pet?”

“Mmm?” She had been drifting in that quiet place somewhere on the verges of sleep. 

“Sorry. Never mind.”

“No, it’s okay.” She prodded herself to something resembling wakefulness, aware he was probably trying to stay awake himself and wanted someone to talk to. Her brain was tired, sure, but her body was not, hence the incredibly difficult time she was having getting to sleep. It had been hours. Hours of just sort of laying here, vibrating, aware of everything. The stale smoke and cheap detergent smells of the room, the old carpet fibers beneath her blanket nest, probably dust mites, flaking paneling, harsh chemicals from the aging bathroom... And, whether she tried to ignore it or not, Spike. 

She would never have admitted it two days ago, but he was by far the most attractive of the aromas around her, dammit; faint aroma of cigarettes and lingering leather and all. At least his smoke-scent was recent and fragrantly reminiscent of sweet tobacco, and the blood-smell was incredibly faint—not even offensive, really—and he otherwise smelled…

/Just stop. You’re losing your damn mind. What you need is a good slay. As soon as you get that, you’ll be able to cash out./

“I was just wondering,” he murmured, and the bed shifted. He had come closer, was leaning over a bit to regard her in what to her was complete darkness, though he could probably see her as if he was peering through full moonlight. He sounded... cautious almost, and okay, what was he about to ask? 

“Spit it out, Spike.” She was definitely awake now, and starting to feel a little irritated at his unlikely attitude. 

“Been thinkin’,” he went on after a short pause. “You’ve been too understanding about everything. Must be a reason. Who…” His voice tightened, hardened. “Who hurt you?”

She froze. “Who says anyone did?”

Another short silence, then, “You know what it’s like to be vulnerable in this particular way. Or at least, you’ve come close enough to imagine.”

She bit her lip and fought the tears that wanted to rise. Shook her head in the dark, afraid he could see and read her reactions, even maybe smell the tears. “I didn’t… It wasn’t…” /Just, no, dammit!/ “It wasn’t like…”

“But it could have been?”

Damn him. Why did he have to be so stupidly insightful? Why couldn’t she punch him to shut him up? Why…

“You don’t have to tell me, luv. I just…” His voice was soft, quiet, irritatingly understanding… and dammit, she had seen  _ him _ this naked. Seen him go through much worse. If it would help him… 

“It was a friend, is the problem,” she informed him through clenched teeth. “I think I would rather it was a stranger.”

His voice tightened up again. “Who?” he asked, voice soft and dangerous.

She shook her head again, in the dark. “It doesn’t matter. He was… possessed.” Managed a too-fast, too-high laugh of dismissal, a light shrug. “Hellmouth hijinks. I clocked him over the head and got away.” The dull recitation kept the memories from swamping her. “But I wasn’t sure I would, for a second. He was… pretty strong with that demon in him, and I…” She flinched, remembering hot breath and feral eyes… and a friend’s smell, a friend’s  _ feel _ … A friend’s voice, once-trusted, telling her things that hadn’t sounded entirely hyena-based. 

_ “Is that what you really want? We both know what you really want. You want danger, dontcha? You like your men dangerous. …Dangerous and mean, right? Like Angel. Your Mystery Guy. Well, guess who just got mean.”  _ On top of her, stalking toward her, ignoring her protests.  _ “Do you know how long... I've waited... until you'd stop pretending that we aren't attracted...”  _ Pushing her against the vending machine. Too strong…  _ “Now do you wanna hurt me? Come on, Slayer. I like it when you're scared.”  _ Sniffing her body; smelling her fear. Letting it light the rapacious glint in his eye. _ “The more I scare you, the better you smell.” _

“You kill this bastard?” Spike asked conversationally. Buffy’s eyes jerked up, out of the terrifying past and into the now, where a Master vampire’s voice promised cold and vicious death to someone he thought a faceless stranger, if she hadn’t already dealt it. In that instant she felt sincere relief that she hadn’t informed him as to her attacker’s identity, because it was very clear that he would kill Xander. He’d straight up murder her friend, headaches be damned, and he would in no way regret doing it. God; and Xander hadn’t even been responsible for his actions, didn’t remember what he’d done… didn’t deserve that sort of vengeance. It had been the demon in him that had…

/Oh./

/ _ Oh _ ./

/Oh, man./

She had totally forgiven Xander for everything the demon in him had made him do, even if the human part of him had kind of maybe wanted her too, and only held back because decent humans didn’t do stuff like that. But vampires had demons in them all the time driving them to kill and feed—to survive, no less—and she had made zero allowances for that fact even though it was basically the same rubric. 

/But… they’re feeding on and killing humans, and it’s my  _ job _ to stop them!/ warred with, /Still, that doesn’t change the fact that I haven’t been looking at it like it’s the same thing, which is totes not fair./ Vampires were humans with demons riding around inside them, making them do all kinds of vicious things, and yet when Xander had been in that position she had totally forgiven him and welcomed him back into the fold. When someone like Spike…

/But… Xander had his soul in there the whole time, and Spike doesn’t. Angel didn’t have his soul in there when Angelus was…/

Something in Buffy’s brain crashed to a screeching halt when it hit a logic wall; like a Crash Test Dummy ricocheting off of a big pile of immovable brick. Because Xander had done all that with his soul in place, if submerged, which almost made it  _ worse _ . /And if you put how Angelus acted up against how Spike acts, there’s seriously no contest which soulless vamp I’d want hanging around./

Damn, damn, dammit.

“Buffy?” Spike prodded, voice both insistent and oddly gentle.

“No,” she murmured, coming back to the present. “I didn’t kill him. Just put him in a cage till the possession wore off. He’s fine now.” She bit her lip. “The, um, demon that pushed him to do the deed is gone, and the… parts of him that went along with it, if they were there, are under wraps, I guess…” God, she had never thought of that before now. Obviously Xander would never…

Of  _ course _ , Xander would never. She trusted Xander with her life. It was the hyena spirit that had taken off all restraint, had prodded him to… To… “Anyway, he doesn’t even remember.”   
“Too bad,” Spike murmured. “S’pose it’s not fair to go find the sod and rip his bloody head off for him, then.” A gimlet glare found hers; just the faintest discernable gleam in the dark. “Even if you’d tell me who. Though, considerin’ what happened to your rotten little high school, I’d be impressed if the bastard survived to graduate.”

Buffy felt a strangely bleak smile crease her lips. “A lot of us didn’t, for sure.” She looked away then, feeling something rise in her; the need to speak up about a thing she had never mentioned to anyone before now, aside from her mother… and then, only in much-abbreviated code. Somehow, though, she felt safe speaking of it in current company. Which was probably a bad thing, considering his clear penchant for seeking vengeance on her behalf… but since he couldn’t exact said vengeance right now without having his head explode, it was probably alright. /And besides. He’ll understand. I can tell him./ Having the weight of guilt off her shoulders, however undeserved, would be such a relief. She knew, intellectually, that she didn’t deserve to carry it—to carry any shame at all for such things—but it didn’t remove the stain from her mind. “It wasn’t… the only time.”

She swore she could feel him tense. “Yeah?” he asked, carefully.

She nodded, picking at the blanket beneath her hip with two fingers. “I was, um, fourteen? Dad had some business associate over. He was out to get some drinks at the liquor store. I think he was out of gin or whatever. Mom was gone; leading a tour at the MOCA. She used to contract out to the Museum while she consulted about pieces…”

He made a sort of encouraging noise; the faintest of rumbles to let her know he was still listening, but did not interrupt. It helped. “So, I, um, was there alone with this guy, and he started telling me how pretty I was and crap like that. Of course I didn’t know how to handle it, said thanks, whatever. He was like forty…” She shrugged, still feeling the shame, wondering to this day what she had done wrong. If she had encouraged him, somehow. “At some point he asked me to get him a beer. I did, and then when I brought it to him he reached out and…” She hesitated, let it slip out. “Touched me. Like,  _ really _ …”

A snarl erupted from Spike, as if in spite of himself. Buffy found herself speaking swiftly to soothe him before he did something nuts, like jumped up and left the motel to go find the guy and rip his head off, chip or no chip. “I, you know, jumped away and asked him what he was doing. He said, ‘I thought you wanted me to’…”

Another inarticulate growl from the enraged vampire next to her. “Bloody fucking hell.”

Buffy couldn’t quite manage to say the rest in full voice, spoke to the blankets beneath her. “Anyway, I basically hid till Dad came back. Till they left. And I guess… I wasn’t brave enough to tell my parents right away. But when I found out he was coming back a couple weeks later to do some more business, I knew I had to tell someone in case he… tried again. I knew I’d be in trouble if he… tried harder, so I went for a walk with Mom and… hinted about what happened. I figured if I told Dad…” She shrugged a little in the dark. “He isn’t, you know, action!guy. Really he’s barely healthclub!guy… but I think he’d still try to go to prison, and I didn’t want that, so I think that was partly why I kept my mouth shut till then. But I figured maybe Mom would break it to him in a way that would have even less details than what I told her, but enough that he’d know at least not to invite the guy back…”

When Spike spoke up, his voice was incredibly tight. “What happened?”

Buffy sighed. “Mom must’ve taken care of it. She got really quiet. Told me she was glad I said something. The guy never came back to our house, and Dad didn’t go to prison, so that’s of the good, I guess. He did come back home a day or so later with his knuckles all bruised, and with one finger in a brace like he had a busted knuckle, so I guess Daddy did know how to throw a punch if he needed to…”

A short, fraught silence filled the room, then, “Good on your da, then. This day an’ age makes it tough to be a father. In mine you just put a bullet in a man, or a sword, end of. No one would’ve looked askance if it came to that sort of thing. Nowadays they send you to prison even so.”

Buffy made a face. “Nowadays they blame the girl.”

At this Spike got seriously irate. “You didn’t invite some geezer to try to touch a sodding child, Buffy. You put him off. Asked for help from your parents. All you could do.”

His words—the words of a vampire—absolved her of an old shame. New tears crept up in spite of her control, but they were tears of relief. “I guess so.”

“Hey. A pale arm reached out, shimmering in the gloom, and his fingers stopped just shy of her chin. Twitched as if he wanted to lift her face. She followed the movement even though he didn’t quite touch her, met his gaze with as much courage as she could manage under the circumstances. And saw understanding. Vast wells of understanding in eyes so close she could make them out even in the near-total darkness. “Don’t carry it. It isn’t yours to carry.” His mouth twisted slightly, a pale glow of a gesture visible despite the shadows hovering around them. “Wisdom of the ages, trust me. Don’t carry what isn’t yours. Let the bastards keep it.”

Buffy nodded, let out her held breath. “I know I was lucky. That I was old enough to know what to say, and what to do. That I could stop it. That I told my mom, and that my dad did something about it. I know it’s not as bad as… other girls have experienced—and some guys, obviously—but…” Heard the small noise from him, bulled on fiercely. “And now I have Slayer-strength, so I’ll probably never…” Except that she’d had Slayer-strength when Xander… 

Spike’s low exhale, full of awareness, telling her he was thinking exactly that same thing. “But I won’t forget,” she murmured softly, “how it felt.” /So maybe it was enough to be… compassionate. For you. Not that I wanted what happened to me to happen to me. Or, God! For what happened to you to happen to you! But…/

“It’s always bad enough, pet,” Spike interrupted her thoughts quietly, and there was a note in his voice that was both soft and paradoxically rough. Maybe angry? “Don’t go comparin’.” A short pause. “Don’t suppose you’d like to tell me the first sod’s name? Since you won’t tell me the other’s, him bein’ a possessed, amnesiac kid an’ that?” 

Oh, yeah, that was rage in his voice, if carefully-leashed. /Sure, I’ll tell you. When hell freezes over, I’ll tell you. Because I so want you to explode your head like a melon when you go after him./ For some reason she did not question in the slightest that he would, though why the slayer of Slayers wanted to retroactively defend the virtue of his primeval enemy and current quarry-on-hiatus should have been the hell of a puzzler. “Spike,” she said instead, “don’t. It’s over. It’s done.”

“It isn’t,” he answered, still tightly. “A bastard like that won’t stop. He’ll have done it again, and worse, to some other wee chit, yeah?”

Oh, god; she hadn’t thought of that. 

“Know the type, don’t I? Had to watch Angelus do it to how many young, defenseless virgins over the years?”

/Oh God…/ 

“Had to stand by and watch him do it to Dru, again and again, even after he already destroyed her. No way I’m gonna stand by while some other twisted headcase goes after another infant like that and…”

Buffy shivered, because the slavering rage in his voice told her some things she had known but had never acknowledged. That there were soulless demons… and there were soulless demons. And Spike may have killed young girls in passing for the sake of making a meal of them, but he had clearly never… done to them what Angelus had. Which was still awful, sure, but…

There were demons, and there were demons. And the one sitting here with her had a sense of honor she would never again argue. “Is that why… all this trouble started… with you and the Hellions?” she heard herself ask, quietly.

He froze. Hissed a little breath out through his teeth, and then, “Watched Dru be abused too many times by  _ family _ to want to let it happen again once she was in my care and I could stop it. So if that means now I have to take the consequences on myself… I’ll take it and glad, Buffy. I’ll not turn back time, and I don’t regret what’s happened.” 

/Wow./ That took… a serious amount of, like,  _ chivalry _ . Buffy wasn’t sure she could even fathom it, because she would take back the things that had almost happened to her in a second. And yet, here he was saying that he wouldn’t take back the awful, horrible, terrible thing that had been done to him, because he considered it payment for keeping someone he loved safe, just paid later on, and that was…

“Any road, it’s given us a chance to get to know one another better, yeah? Wouldn’t trade that for any money.”

Buffy sat still, floored, as he moved back onto the center of the bed with a quiet rustle. 

The thought that the insane vamp wouldn’t trade all this pain and suffering away because he had gotten to spend time with  _ her, _ of all people, was… It was…

That just made exactly  _ zero _ sense.

Of course, she was really glad to have had the time to get to know him better as well. She had learned a hell of a lot about demons, vampires, her job, her world… and whether she liked it or not, herself. Some of the lessons had hurt, were still hurting, were bought to the tune of some extreme confusion, would surely cost her serious fallout later on when she brought them back to the Scoobies. But they were valuable lessons, and valid ones.

Unfortunately, they had also been very much at his expense, and that was just not okay. If she could trade it all to make Spike safe and whole again…

Her eyes drifted up to the bed, remembering his self-assured swagger, painless and free. And frowned. /But I would never know what lives underneath all that bravado. I’d never know… you./

Closing her eyes, Buffy turned away on her pallet and fought the tsunami of conflicting emotions that threatened to drown her.

***

They spread out, every one of them finding his own entertainment. There were bars to loot, stores to crash and burn, homes to pillage, locals of the human and peaceful demon variety to terrorize. And there was no quarter. 

Damn, the place was ripe. A nice, juicy plum, ready to be plucked. And no hint of the Slayer, anywhere in evidence.

At some point, as the town went up in flames and the screaming turned to forting up, the terrified rabbits huddling wherever they could find hutches, some white hats showed; human, all of them, though one with power. The little bitch tried to throw some witchcraft their way, but it was a pitiful attempt. The boys threw it off after only a few bad hits; just ran right over the top of the frightened covey till it scattered. 

“You know,” Razor informed Beater as they settled back against the bar and helped themselves to Willy’s stock, “I think I’m gonna like this place.” The white-hot evil of one truly badass hellmouth coursed through him, and he almost wanted to keep carousing, but he’d spent the first edge. Now he wanted to just sit in the feeling of it. Let it bathe him for a while before he went for a second round, maybe steep himself in it forever. /Damn, that’s nice. Addictive./ He could see why this place was such a popular tourist destination, Slayer or no Slayer. /Hell, maybe she took one look at us and ran and we won’t have to deal with her at all. Fucking whore./ 

Turning around, he nodded at the snitchy bartender, watched the little bitch shiver from where he was pinned to the wall next to the drinks; held up by every dart in the bar and not a few knives. Piss coated the wall behind him, pooled beneath him on the cheap linoleum of the floor. “So, you think your Slayer’s still gonna come and save your worthless ass?” He waved his clawed hand around, gesturing with the bottle of fine tequila he’d relieved from stores. “Don’t see her anywhere.” And he laughed uproariously.

The bartender looked at him wide-eyed, piss-stained and sweating. And stammered, pale and terrified. “I…I… don’t know where she is… but when she does show…” His voice hardened. “Man… you are so dead.”

Big talk from a guy who probably thought they were gonna kill him if he got in a word edgewise. Razor wasn’t gonna do that yet though. Not till he got the names of the little dick’s alcohol suppliers. 

Wouldn’t do to take over a dry town. “We’ll see, won’t we?” He chuckled and took a swig of the slick golden fluid, bit down on the worm. “We’ll just see.”

* * *

The Nile be dryin'.  
Also... um, I have a confession to make. I couldn't find a quote that worked for what I was trying to get across on Spike's behalf... so i made one up to sound properly ancient. Maybe we can assume Spike made it up. Hence, his 'quote' about cloth is kinda sorta 'Anon', lol.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short, harsh chapter. Time for reality to crash the party.  
And now we're all caught up.

It was probably about eight, judging by the way the morning light tried mightily to edge around the crappy, frazzled polyester curtains. Buffy blinked awake to gaze thoughtfully at the floating dust-motes as they marked the slow dance of a time outside of time. Tongued her mossy teeth and internally yucked at the taste of her two-day-old tongue. She really, really wished she had a toothbrush here, because holy wow, her breath was probably the worst by now, which was super-embarrassing considering she was sharing the room with a vampire who could smell things with insane acuity. She didn’t even have deodorant here, and while she could shower, the activity would be rendered nil considering that she would be putting on the same clothes afterward.

It was seriously time to get out of here and reenter normal, regular time, face the music, et cetera and blah blah blah.

Buffy did not move. A strange reluctance possessed her; made her wish, despite the buzzing need within to seek out some physical activity—do some pushups, some crunches, run around the block, something!—that she could just stay like this, with Spike. Hide out from her life. Run away again, avoid all the questions and the accusing eyes. Just… bail on her reality and…

/And what, Buffy? Go  _ where? _ / She had taken that road before; run away from her home, her hellmouth and her destiny, and look what it had gotten her. Her Calling had followed her, dragged her kicking and screaming back to her painful reality, forced her to face the music. /I am what I am. I can’t change it. Nothing can change what I am and what I have to do; no matter what it does to me. No matter what it takes from me; even if it destroys me. Till it kills me, takes everything; even things that are… worse than taking my life./ Angel and Angelus had taught her that. There was no escaping her Calling, her fealty, her… what was that word from the Book? Her  _ gessa _ . Her life. 

“Time to pay the piper, is it?”

The fuzzy unreality of the moment was broken by his low, knowing comment. Without even turning her head or moving in the slightest, Buffy answered, hands still cradled behind her head. “How the heck do you  _ do _ that?”

“Mmm?”

“Practically read my mind.”

“You’ve world’s most legible face, pet. ‘Mind me never to teach you poker. You’d lose all your dosh in one hand.”

Buffy rolled her eyes at the ceiling, but didn’t otherwise reply. 

Rising in one swift movement, Spike tossed back his single blanket and treaded carefully around the foot of the bed, then around her nest, to crouch in front of the tiny fridge. Tugged out his second container of blood. Opened it, gave it a sniff. Winced slightly.

“It didn’t go bad already, did it?”

“No,” he answered, back still to her. Stood up, turning to her in profile, for which she was grateful, since it meant she didn’t have to look at his stained jeans. With how dark they were, the mark wasn’t even all that noticeable when he stood; not really. Not unless you knew what you were looking for. “Just smells even worse when it’s not warm.” Then, to her surprise, he tossed back a gulp, cold. 

/Okay?/ “The microwave mysteriously broke overnight?”

“Hungry. Tired of hurting.”

/Oh, wow./ That flat statement, made without a single pretense at prevarication, told her all she needed to know. He might not be moving quite as gingerly today, but he was still clearly in a bad way if he was this impatient. 

She waited in silence, gripping her own hands together as he swiftly downed the contents of the Styrofoam container. Watched as his pallor receded a little more, his red racoon-eyes going from scarlet to a light fuchsia, though they remained there to ring his lashes a startling crimson. And he still looked a hair too thin, a lot less muscled and just generally less  _ vital _ than he had when she had first fought him, back when he’d roared into town with Drusilla junior year, all braggadocio and punk enthusiasm and vicious anticipation for a good fight. 

She knew without asking that the second quart of pig’s blood hadn’t done the trick. “Why aren’t you healing, Spike?” It was all she could do to keep the tremor out of her voice; to keep it a simple, straightforward inquiry. /This is business. This is…/ 

/He’s gonna say he needs human blood, isn’t he?/

The worst part was, she knew now it wouldn’t be some sort of nasty vampire ploy to get ‘the good drugs’, or to have his hellish way with the populace. Clearly animal blood didn’t do for him what human blood did. She was a firsthand witness. It was keeping him alive… but it was like living on bad jerky when you should be eating sirloin steak and fire-roasted veggies. /We had it so wrong. And what am I even supposed to  _ do _ with that? Because that means his very existence is… like… What’s the word? Anti-ethical or whatever, to my entire reason for existing./ 

/We can’t ever ‘just get along’, can we?/ 

For some reason, that thought made her feel like bursting into wrenching sobs. 

When Spike spoke, though, he actually managed to surprise her. “Might’ve healed by now even on this rubbish, save… That lot, Buffy, the Hellions?” He looked away toward the very ugly art print on the wall above the TV, very carefully avoiding her eyes. “They aren’t… anatomically the same as you an’ me. Takes a bit longer to heal from that sort of treatment when… that’s the case, is all.”

It took her a second to catch up to what he was saying. Then… /Oh Godohgodohgod…/ “If we had…” She drew in a deep, shuddering breath and wondered where the heck they would even manage to scrounge up the money, but… “I mean, you said the hospital…”

A sharp, urgent banging on the door interrupted her sentence before she could finish her thought, scattering her concentration to the wind. She actually jumped, she had been so focused on Spike’s painful conundrum. Spike must have been as well, because whoever was out there, he had apparently not heard them approach to judge from the fact that he, too, flinched. Of course, he covered it well, turning a glare on the offending panel. “It’s Red,” he informed her after a short moment’s ‘listening’.

“Wh… Willow?” Buffy asked, stupidly.

“Know any other redheads?”

/Well, Oz, when he’s not a blue-head, but he’s so not around right now./ “Um…” Willow would never bang like that unless there was something seriously wrong going down. Stomach fluttering, Buffy approached the door with a feeling of growing trepidation. “Coming!”

When she opened the door, she was amazed and horrified at what she saw on the other side.

Willow was a mess. Her hair was all wind-blown-looking and flippy, she had a smudge of something on one cheek, a bruise standing livid on the other, and her eyes were wide and unblinking with something that looked like only slightly-controlled terror on her face. “Buffy, oh my God, you’re okay!” And, impulsively, she barged in to lunge forward and wrap Buffy up in a hug that was almost painful even from a Willow-to-Buffy standpoint.

“Um, yeah? Why, Wil, what’s up?”

Willow pulled back to blink at her, nonplussed. “You weren’t answering your pager!” she gasped. “Nothing, no matter how many times we tried. And with everything going down out there…”

“Oh, shoot…” Buffy yanked the thing out of her pocket, studied it. Dark screen, dark everything. “Oops.” She shot Spike a faintly shamefaced glance, caught his amused tongue-roll. Mr. Conspiratorial was clearly unfazed by the peace they had enjoyed sans-beeper. “Totally forgot to turn it back on after you all were blowing me up yesterday…”

Wil stared at her for a second as if she was insane. “Since when do you  _ ever _ …”

Buffy winced. “Okay, I’m really sorry, but it was a total accident. And anyway, what could possibly have gone down since you left that’s so major that you’re…” Wil’s whole demeanor registered belatedly, and Buffy raised a hand to touch the bruised cheek. “Crap. Wil, what  _ happened?” _

Wil shook her head, looking abruptly completely overwhelmed. “Wow. So you really don’t know. Like, you haven’t even  _ heard?” _ She stared around the room at the unlit television, the closed curtains. “You haven’t, like, watched the news, or even looked  _ outside? _ Can’t you  _ hear _ it out there?”

Buffy frowned and tuned in to the noise drifting in from outside their quiet bubble. The motel itself had been strangely silent, she realized now, upon doing a little bit of mental playback; as if the tenants here had been huddling in fear or something. And now that the door was open she could hear it, distantly; the faintest hints of rising and falling fear and catastrophe, echoing over the quiet morning air. 

Behind her, Spike sniffed. Tilted his head. And cursed. “Oh, sodding Christ. We missed the boat, Buffy. Missed it right out. I think the piper’s already come to collect, while we were having a kip.”

Buffy fought down the tremor that wanted to overtake her entire being; the one that said she had fallen down on the job, and now people were suffering for it; because she had relaxed, taken something for herself, let one person become more important than the mission… All the things she was never supposed to do. Ever. She had stuck a sword in someone she loved more than anything because she knew she could never do that. And now… “What… What’s going on out there, Wil?”

Willow didn’t bother to suppress her shaking. “Some kind of insane demon bike-gang.”

/Oh no…/

“They’re, like, taking  _ over! _ We tried to take ‘em on…”

Spike made a pained sort of noise in his throat. Wil charged on without pause, clearly barely even noticing the background commentary. 

“…But they just knocked us over like flies. They’re sort of staging from Willy’s bar. I think they have him hostage. Even the local demons are hiding from them.” Wil’s eyes went fearful. “These guys are scary, Buffy. Like, uber-terrifying. They’re burning things down, looting the stores, stealing everything that’s not nailed to the floors, breaking windows in houses, chasing people down and…” She went white, and her face went blank, but her eyes told the story. 

“Raping, pillaging, and looting,” Spike defined the issue. “It’s what invading armies do.”

Buffy tried not to react too loudly to the bleak thing in his voice. Not in front of Wil, but she knew Spike heard the small, miserable noise she held trapped in the back of her throat, saw the way she tightened her arms briefly around her body before she forced them back down to her sides, folded her hands tightly into fists. /Just, no./ “Anything else I need to know?” she asked, and heard her own glacial emotionlessness as she fought to gain some distance from the crisis. /If I’d been paying more attention, I would have stopped them before they hurt anyone else. I could have…/

Spike stepped forward, laid a hand on her tense shoulder. “Isn’t your fault, Buffy. They’re not here because of you, yeah?”

“Because of my hellmouth. Same diff.” It came out clipped and mechanical. Her voice did not shake. But the responsibility was there… and god, it was so heavy this time. Never more so than in the times she failed to uphold it; did things wrong even with the best of intentions, and others paid the price for her failure.

“No,” Spike answered, and his voice was harsh with certainty. “Here because of me, remember? Won’t have you takin’ it all on, pet…”

She fought with all she had not to throw his hand off her shoulder. “You’re not why they stayed.” /They only came in because I was distracted, and they thought I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t…/

“Buffy… Slayer…” His voice was pained.

No. She couldn’t. Not right now. Turned to address Willow, and felt his hand slide reluctantly away from her shoulder. “I’ll take care of it, Wil,” she promised grimly. “Just tell me if there’s anything else I need to…”

Wil stared at her as if she was some new amoeba under her microscope. “Uh, since when do you two to do all the touchy-feely…”

“Wil! Anything else I need to know?” She so didn’t have the time. For any of it. Feelings, thoughts, explanations. No cope at all. She had already made too many mistakes.

And now people were suffering. Dying. /Every time I relax, even for a second…/ 

“Uh… I think those commando guys might be trying to fight the biker-demons, or at least figure out how to curtail them. We’ve been seeing ‘em on the streets here and there, flitting around in twos and threes, since really early this morning. I think some of them are… what did Xander call it? ‘Taking up positions’ in some of the alleys…”

Oh, this was just getting out of hand. No way were some random, mysterious commandos and a bunch of demon bikers going to have a turf-war on her hellmouth because she had had the horrible bad taste to take a stupid time-out right in the middle of their dumb invasion! “Okay, great. I’m on it. Thanks for telling me, Wil.” She looked around the room, frowning. She’d like to tell her bestie to stay here where it was safe, but the room was only theirs for three more hours. “Maybe you can hang out till at least eleven…”

Wil frowned and shook her head. “No, I mean, you’ll need me. And everyone’s gonna be freaked, wondering where I disappeared to. They might end up trying to search for me and get themselves hurt, out looking…”

/Eeee…/ That was a terrifying thought. “Jeez; how did you even get away, get all the way here without getting hurt more?”

A shy, proud smile touched Wil’s dirty face with that ‘I’m getting good at witchy-stuff’ glow. “I, uh, used a sort of cloaking spell thing. It’s not much…” she blushed. “Even though Xander is gonna go on and on about it like I’m a ship from ‘Star Trek’…”

“I’ll say. Sodding Romulans would have nothing on you, Red, if you can go about all invisible-like amongst the enemy and tweak their noses…”

They both turned to regard Spike in surprise. “What?” he protested. “Watch a sodding lot of late-night telly. Have you any idea how much bloody ‘Star Trek’ is re-run, round the whole bleedin’ world, along about midnight?”

Buffy rolled her eyes and turned back to Wil. “You can make yourself invisible?” she demanded. Not to agree too strongly with the startlingly geeky (or very bored?) vampire, but he had a point. That was of the uber-cool.

“No. Not really; not even a little. It just basically convinces everyone around you to… well… not notice you.”

A flicker of alarm began in the pit of Buffy’s belly; grew into a winding tendril of fear. “Oh my God, Wil, that sounds crazy dangerous! If it went wrong you could end up like Marcie Ross!” 

“Oh, give me some credit, Buffy! I’d never keep it on that long. But I will tell you, there were definitely times I wished I had it in high school; like when the Cordettes would come around the corner and I just knew they were about to start in on me…” At Spike’s incredulous throat-clearing she straightened from her bright-eyed lean, nodded briskly. “Anyway, I had to come. It was that or break. Everyone was all frantic-mode. Giles is freaking, your mom is freaking, Xander is mondo-freaking. They’re all, ‘Where the hell is Buffy, where the hell has she  _ been, _ where is Spike, is this all  _ his _ fault’…”

“‘Course the Boy would manage to twist it round so I came ‘round as the culprit in the bloody mess,” Spike grumbled.

Buffy might have demanded to know why he thought Xander was the one who had said that part, except it was kind of a foregone conclusion, wasn’t it? 

“…And then they started paying attention to me,” Willow went on, and grimaced. Wriggled uncomfortably. “Once they decided I was up to something, or maybe knew something about what you were up to and started hinting around that if I did know something I should speak up, I made a break for it. I knew we needed you anyway, and since you weren’t showing up, I thought either something might’ve happened to you, or maybe you somehow didn’t know…” Her expression was still slightly incredulous that the latter was the true explanation for their current state of affairs. “It’s scary out there, Buffy. The town’s, like, under siege. People are hiding in their houses, but pretty soon those guys are gonna start dragging ‘em out. We need to  _ do _ something…” 

“I know, Wil.”

And just like that, the weight came back to settle heavily on Buffy’s shoulders. 

The threat had been only that. A threat. Nothing so dire as an apocalypse. It wasn’t even spring yet. And so she had let temptation win. To stay, and let the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many, just this time. It had seemed like it would be alright, just this once. Nothing earth-shaking going on. No proof anything  _ would _ go wrong. 

But of course it had. Because this was Sunnydale, and that was just what happened here.

Buffy turned to Spike, let him read her gaze.

He answered it without the need for words. “Yeah. It’s time.”

She nodded in response, assessed him with her eyes. “You ready? We can… I dunno. Try to get something from the hospital, I guess, on the way, or…”

He shook his head. "It’d take too long. I assume you’ll want to organize from Watcher’s flat?” To his credit, he didn’t let so much as a grim note decorate his voice as he contemplated returning to his prison.

Buffy shook her head. She didn’t want to go back there just yet, for a lot of reasons. “No. I think… No.” More decisive that time. “I think… I wanna check on Mom. We’ll work from there. Everyone can join us at home if they wanna join in…”

Willow blinked, startled at their apparently half-silent conversation. “You’re, like,  _ communicating _ again. I thought I told you that’s freaksome.” 

This time, Buffy didn’t bother to apologize. “Can you get the gang and meet us at my house, Wil?”

She was answered with a slow nod. “Buffy, I’m sure your mom is alright. Giles called her when all this started to go down, told her to keep her head down, stay inside. She was fine then…”

“When was this?” Buffy did her best not to snap it out, but she was feeling very ‘commander-girl’ right now, even if she had screwed up majorly. 

She had a lot to make up for. Time to start now. She had to organize the troops, make some kind of battle plan… 

“Last night, around midnight…”

“We definitely gotta check in on Joyce, then,” Spike put in. “Been too bloody long since someone’s had eyes on her. That lady’s too decent a woman to be left alone with these bastards in town.” Turning away, he shoved his lighter roughly into his pocket. “We can take the sewers, luv.”

Buffy winced. “I thought you had a car. Where is it right now?”

“Too bloody far away for me to get to it without goin’ up like a fumarole…”

“Whatever  _ that _ is.” Buffy exhaled in frustration. “Is it at least on the way? I’d like to keep my sewer travel to a minimum if at all possible. I already smell bad enough as it is.”

“Lies and foul calumny.”

“Sure?” Look at him trying to be all sweet about her stench. 

Spike twitched the curtain aside to peek out, like a madman. Buffy made to yelp and leap forward, already prepared to pat him out when he went up like a candle. Relaxed when he didn’t, and she realized that the window wasn’t precisely in the way of direct sun. Daredevil. “The sods will be aboveground, as they’re bloody well mated to their motorbikes. Maybe best to stay below till we reach your mum’s.”

Buffy made a moue at his assessing antics. “I kind of want to check out the lay of the land if I can,” she reminded him grimly. “You know, poke my head out and see what I can see? At least halfway.”

He nodded and dropped the curtain. “Be risking a fight early, but I’d see why you’d want a reccie…”

“Glad you see it my way.” The way he let her take the lead, totally without question, was strangely satisfying. It fulfilled some bizarre need in her that she had never known was there, and did that make her a bad person, or just really, really tired of fighting every battle uphill while the rocks of opinion and the heavy boulders of debate kept trying to roll right down over her?

“You guys are really freaking me out. And seriously; you don’t wanna be out there right now with those things out there on the streets. They’ll just run you down.” Willow sounded something between anxious about their compromise, and downright unnerved about their apparent sympatico.

“I’ll keep your Slayer intact, Red,” Spike told her blandly, and turned his attention promptly back to Buffy. “We can pick up the DeSoto halfway. It’s parked at a friend’s for now; name of Clement. Loose-Skinned demon. Nice bloke. Played cards with him once or twice at Willy’s back when I first came to town and needed some time away from Dru to clear my head.” He grinned a little. “You’d like him, I think, pet. Sweet bloke; wouldn’t hurt a fly if the soddin’ thing bit him.”

Okay, this she had to see. “Loose-Skin…” 

“Don’t ask what the excess skin’s for and you’ll be the happier for it.”

Buffy felt a small smile creep onto her lips in spite of herself, and crossed her arms over her chest. “I didn’t know you had friends,” she admitted, only teasing a little. Inwardly, she was glad of it. 

“No need to be insulting, you!” He paused for a moment, shrugged. “Wouldn’t call the tosser my closest confidant or any of that rot, but he’s nice enough.” He favored her with a brief, loaded glance, looked away again. “Any road, we’ll get the car, have a nice reccie; though what you’ll manage to see through the windows…”

Buffy frowned, arrested by this note. “Why, are they…”

“Blacked out and all over foil. What, you think I can drive about in the day without it?  _ Vampire _ , luv.”

“Oh. Right.” Dropping her arms, she made a face. “I’ll scrape a hole in the paint and get what I can out of it.”

“Ruin my meticulous paint job…” he groused.

“Oh, bite me.” /Wow, did I just say that?/

The look Spike flashed her was full of the devil and a great whopping load of delight. “Slayer!”  
  
“Okay, seriously; what is going  _ on _ between you two?”

Buffy winced and cut the banter short. /Plan made. Time to get the ball rolling, dammit!/ She waved a brisk hand toward the door. “Lead the way, William. I’m sure there’s a sewer entrance around here somewhere close.”

Spike blinked at her briefly as if she had startled him, then jerked into motion and sidled around Wil to poke his head out of the door. “No doubt, but also no doubt it’s in the sodding sun.” He turned back to eye Buffy regretfully, pointed with his chin at the bed. “We’re gonna lose our deposit, luv.”

Passing an oddly-staring Willow, She swiped the cheap blanket, feeling only slightly bad about it. Maybe if this thing ended with the town still intact she’d bring it back, only lightly-singed. “Haha.” Was it bad that she was kind of looking forward to Mr. Insulting McRegister finding out that her light-fingered vamp had relieved him of his bonus twenty?

/Man. Two days around William the Bloody and I’m already kind of a minor criminal. Talk about a bad influence./ “Speaking of, I’m bringing the pizza.”

“Eat it quick, pet. No doubt you’ll lose even  _ your _ appetite, once we get below.”

She was in no way going to bet against him on that one. She just ducked into the pizza box and grabbed up the last withered slice, munched it for breakfast as they trooped out into the thin edge of shade that graced the upstairs walkway.

***

“What are these guys; Army?” Bone-Breaker grunted as he eyed the armored posse on the far side of the street.

Dome didn’t answer. He just grunted back and cracked his knuckles, reset them on his ape-hangers. It was above his pay-grade to give a shit who the targets were, as long as he got to ride over ‘em. 

“Well.” Bone-Breaker set himself in his saddle, tossed back a drink from his flask. “They want a party…”

Dome grunted agreement and gunned his mule.

“Ready to ride?”

A truculent nod.

“Then let’s ride,  _ panzón!” _

The two Harleys churned directly into the three soldiers in their black Kevlar. The agents got off a few sprays of bullets before diving aside. And yes, as elite, Special-Forces-gleaned operatives, they were very accurate. Bone-Breaker was down before they broke the wave… but his hawg continued without him, sliding across the pavement to crash through one soldier, pinning him to the brick wall with his legs beneath the bike. He no doubt had a broken pelvis, at the very least, with that half ton of steel and chrome crushing him to the asphalt. 

Dome, bleeding and with several bullets in him, swung around roaring, to go after the other two of the scattered covey. Leaving their injured brother behind for the nonce, the Initiative soldiers dodged, spraying bullets behind themselves as they danced with death.

They had discovered the same thing that Buffy had before them, and peasants and infantry had before that when going up against armored knights and mercenary cavalry. To wit, it didn’t matter how long your reach was with your weapon, be it a rifle or a pike. When your enemy was mounted on a heavy horse, he would always have a distinct advantage in speed and mass over a combatant afoot.

* * *

And it just got real.  
How well will our tender new simpatico hold up as we reenter the world, and come face-to-face with the big bads invading Sunnydale?  
  
Tune in next week, and all that jazz


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hallo all.  
Got behind again. My bad. I'll get us caught up asap. Meantime... I have an excuse for what happens in this chapter.   
So... I introduce a person and a friendship probably a little earlier than canon would have had it happen, because I needed this guy and because Buffy needs to get to know him about now, and because he's adorbs and i love him.

Willow broke ranks from them as soon as a lightly-smoking, blanket-tarped Spike had jumped down into the redolent depths of the nearby manhole. She didn’t say much, just eyed Buffy briefly across about three feet of space in the preternaturally quiet parking lot. The bright morning sun almost hurt Buffy’s eyes after two days of uber-dim motel rooms, all set to low, vamp-level light. “Buffy, are you really okay?”

/Oh jeez./ She really wished she knew the answer to that. But officially? “Yeah. I am. I just… There’s a lot going on, Wil.” And for right now, that was honestly the best she could do.

“Yeah,” Wil answered, sounding very thoughtful, and more than a little worried. “You better hurry, or you’ll have to catch up. Which would mean excess splashing and getting lost in icky, dark tunnels, which sounds not of the fun.”

Buffy didn’t bother to tell her that no way was Spike going to leave her behind. She just nodded. “Please wear your ‘don’t look at me, I’m not here’ spell till you’re safe?”

“Oh, totally.”

Buffy gave her a brief, impulsive hug, just in case, when this all ended, Wil decided to never talk to her again. She was way relieved when Willow hugged her back. For the moment, her best friend was still affording her the benefit of the doubt that came of blind faith. Wil had done everything she could to prove that she believed in Buffy despite her track record to date, and in doing so had possibly saved Spike. The fact that Wil thought Buffy had earned that faith back, despite everything, was both a relief and a terrifying weight, knowing she might have already gambled it away. /Not that I meant to. It’s just…/

/What even is my life?/

The worst part was, she didn’t even know how to fix it. “Thank you, Wil. For everything.”

“Buffy?”

Okay, that had probably sounded a little too sad and like a goodbye. /Stop projecting, Buffy. You might be able to damage-control this. Stop the disaster from happening. Stop the breakdown at the center from taking out everything in its path like some kind of tornado all over again…/ “I’ll see you, Wil. In a few.” 

“O…Okay, Buffy.” A short pause, and then,  _ “Oculi omnium visus sim!” _ A swift hand-gesture, drawn upward, and a scattering of some sort of dust… and then Buffy could swear she was looking straight at Wil, but her eyes kept… just sort of drifting off to one side of the spot where she had been standing. She even felt a general revulsion at the thought of looking back that way. 

A faint odor of some sort of pungent herb drifted toward her on the temperate breeze, from an apparent sourceless locale, and she tried to trace it back to the spot where she knew for a fact her friend had been standing just a second ago, but she just simply could not find the will to turn her eyes in that direction. “Wow, Wil,” Buffy breathed. “That’s an awesome one.” 

“Thanks,” a seeming ghost-voice answered from… nowhere really important.

Buffy rubbed her forearms, nodded once to a spot she knew for a fact did not contain her friend, since she couldn’t for the life of her look at the right one, then with a huff of breath, lowered herself and the manhole cover.

“Bloody well took you long enough.”

Buffy stuck her tongue out a Spike as she dropped from the last rung of the ladder. “Impatient, much?”

Barely visible, he grunted in answer. “I have to use the underground highway, luv. Doesn’t mean I enjoy the bouquet.”

Zeroing in on the pale torch of his hair as the only thing standing out in the darkness of the tunnel, Buffy waved her hand in front of her nose. Not that that action had ever made these little journeys any better, but it was worth a shot. “Yeah, if it’s bad for me, I can only imagine.” A quick glance around her was not educational. Using her eyes down here had ever served to orient her. These sewers all looked the same, from what she could see of them in the near-pitch-darkness. The only light in the whole darn place issued from the nearby storm drain. Not that it was a good or useful light. It was more a dim, muted glow coming in at a pointless angle, which mostly struck the upper walls with a gleaming, sullen ochre, and sparked here and there on the surface of the mucky liquid. Which they wouldn’t be able to avoid without the lighting to find footing, and she was so going to have to throw away these cute, white, soon-to-be-garbage sneakers, wasn’t she? 

How Spike found his way around down here was beyond her. “So… which way?”

He grunted and, by the echo-y noise of it, scuffed a boot on the aging, sodden brick. “East a bit, yeah?”

She regarded the pale blur of his hair patiently, hands on hips. “Which means nothing to me down here.”

She could hear the disbelieving glower in his voice when he snapped back. “Don’t give me that rot, Slayer. You were just upstairs! Know you have a better sense of direction than all that!”

She waved a pointed hand around her. “Do you see an east around here? I see no east anywhere!” Not that  _ see _ was exactly the operative word, at least for her, and why was he being dickish? What, was he frustrated with the stink and taking it out on her?

“Well,” he relented, “you do have to go a bit west first, till there’s a bit of a junction, then turn right, and right again over there off of twelfth, and we go along a bit after that east till we get to that bit of wood as crosses over the freeway just past the bus station…”

“This Loose-Skin…”

“Loose- _ Skinned _ . Clement. Clem for short.”

“Clem, lives by the bus station?”

Spike avoided her eyes in favor of striking out along the tunnel. “Not a lot of real estate is a goin’ concern for demons to rent, yeah? Either we make do across the tracks, down by the landfill, up by the depot, find a cave, or settle in one of the crypts. Warehouses are a nice enough bet, if they’re goin’ begging…”

Buffy frowned, aware that until very recently she would have thought that only fair, the unspoken rabble of society living off the unwanted leavings of society. But what if they weren’t doing anyone any harm? Why should they have to live like homeless people?

/But then, why should homeless people have to live like homeless people?/ 

/Basically it’s the same thing, I guess. Anyone we want to pretend doesn’t exist and don’t want to think about, so they don’t get to have an official status./ Pensive, she followed him, trying her best both to keep the faint glow of his hair and arms in view and to simultaneously avoid splashing in the fetid, gross dregs of last month’s stormwater. “Does he at least have, like, a nice place?” she heard herself ask. “I mean, it sounds like it, if he has somewhere to hide a car.”

Spike grunted. “He’s sort of squatting in an old silent film warehouse. No one wants to go near those old cannisters till someone comes to dispose of ‘em, as old film from that era’s bloody explosive. You drop it, knock it over, it’s liable to go off like nitroglycerine…”

Buffy gaped at his retreating skull. “And he’s  _ living _ there?” And who knew old movies were like bombs?

“Not a lot of choices, yeah? It was that or hide out amongst a bunch of old oil drums, or fight it out with a load of Krezhgids over a squat in that one empty warehouse down by the wharf; and no one in their right mind wants to tussle with Krezhgids, ‘less you have an army at your back.” Spike scoffed roughly. “Not least a Loose-Skinned. Got no fight in ‘em; not especially Clem. You hit him, and for all he’s got a whole load of facial tentacles and claws as could strip you to the bone, he’d just lie there and ask you what he did to brass you off and if he could do anything to make it up to you. Offer to buy you a bag of sodding Funyuns or pork rinds or some such shite to make amends, ask if we couldn’t all just be friends.” 

Buffy was having a tough time imagining what this alleged pacifistic demon could even look like, much less how he might act. Her brain couldn’t seem to hold the image. “He sounds… sweet.”

Spike made an evocative, morose noise. “Liability, that one. Shouldn’t be left out alone. Makes a bleedin’ killing in poker, though. He cleans up in kittens, every soddin’ night, enough to bloody well live on.”

Buffy was sure she’d heard that last part wrong. “Did you say kittens?”

“Yeah. Not my fare, but you know. The hoi polloi think they’re delicious.”

Just when she was starting to relax, there was always an underbelly. “Are you trying to tell me,” she demanded, horrified, “that demons gamble for  _ kitten kibble? _ ”

Spike twisted a little to regard her over his shoulder, all pale face, high, shadowed cheekbones and dark hollows. “Any idea how many stray cats there are on the streets, Slayer? Our kind are doin’ our part to end the overpopulation.”

_ “That,” _ she informed him in her most grossed-out tones, “is the most absolutely disgusting thing I have ever heard in my  _ entire _ life. God,” she muttered. “And you wonder why I’m so squicked out by demon society.”

He just snorted and continued his stalking march. 

/I guess we’re agreeing to disagree./

After about three twists and turns that ensured that Buffy was as discombobulated as she ever got in these stupid sewers, Spike nodded to a ladder that looked exactly like every other one she had ever passed in the place. “Up we go, pet.”

“How the heck can you tell?” she asked, not-quite-archly.

He just rolled his eyes at her and then, to her surprise, held out his hands as if to plaster them around her waist and give her a boost up to the first rung. 

She lifted her eyebrows at him. “What, you think I can’t reach? I’m not that much shorter than you, you know.”

It was amazing to watch the approximately nine thousand expressions chase themselves across his face in the faint light that leaked down from around the nearby storm grate. Embarrassment, swiftly followed by defensiveness, then self-mocking, amusement, sarcasm, and a ferocious urge to bite back, before he finally settled on that weird, quiet self-possession he always seemed to wear like a cloak even when he didn’t have his duster. Which, by the way, he needed back, she realized, apropos of precisely nothing. /You look too small without it. Too… vulnerable. Which was fine when it was just us, back there. But out there in the world… you need your armor./ 

“Noticed a bit of slime on the ladder, yeah?” he defended, interrupting her thoughts. “But if you want to get a load of muck on your hands, be my bleedin’ guest…” 

She couldn’t help it. She smiled right in his face. He was  _ so _ busted. She had  _ seen _ him, once upon a time. The way he had squired Drusilla around, playing the gallant gentleman. It had been totally natural to him; probably some holdover from his upbringing a zillion years ago. Back in those days they no doubt beat that stuff into boys to the point it was second nature. She would lay money on it that he had to fight the impulse to hold doors and crap to this day just to keep his nasty, punk image…

Everything inside her screeched to a halt as her brain did a quick replay. 

He had done that with Drusilla. His sire, the woman he had lived to serve for a hundred-and-who-knew-how-many years. And here, all the sudden he was… He was…

/Oh, shit./ 

They watched each other warily for probably way too long a moment, worrying over the slip in mutually-anxious disgrace, before finally Spike sighed and reached out. Caught one high-up rung of the ladder one-handed, swung up almost-gracefully to catch the bottom one with one foot, and held out his hand to her. It was an entirely other sort of move. A teamwork sort of move; one that said, ‘Let’s work together, alright?’

Grateful for the reinterpretation, she took his hand and a rung, and stepped up beside him. Nodded at the blanket he wore tied loosely around his neck like a giant scarf. Wordlessly, he threw it over his head, though by the quality of the light that seeped around the edges of the manhole cover this particular segment of street was somewhat shaded. Once he was safely shrouded, she nudged the cover up one-handed, took a peep. 

No traffic whatsoever. But what she did see took her aback.

Within her small plane of view, two already-neglected houses looked seriously battered; broken windows, one with a recliner shoved through the plate glass, one with a door hanging crazily on its hinges. At the edge of her small wedge of vision, a mailbox was burning like a merry little torch, its flag up and sizzling like the candle of a birthday cake. “Holy crap.”

“Slayer?”

“Our friends have been busy.”

“Best get moving, then.”

“Oh. Right.” Suiting action to his words, she moved to exit and quickly made room for him to follow, swiveling as she did so in search of some rundown old building that might house a demon’s nest. Found one that seemed likely: gray with geometric pillars trimmed in fading purple, a tilting signage atop a broken marquee listing it as ‘Fine Productions, Inc (Purveyors of Fine Films)’. The front of the water-stained old stucco structure was coated with a layer of trash; newspapers stuck to the base of the wall, a few cans and empty water-bottles littering the door alcove. It was the epitome of ‘abandoned business’. “Obviously he doesn’t use the front door.” 

“Round this way, pet.” Exiting behind her, Spike left the manhole wide open to strike out briskly for the shade of the nearest tree, for which oversight she honestly couldn’t blame him, because, sunlight. Shaking her head, Buffy did the civic-minded thing and reclosed the hole before trailing her vampire to the shaded side of the building, found him where he’d disappeared around the left side of the structure. Spike had, to her surprise, bypassed an alley door there, one that appeared to have seen much more recent use, and was making a beeline for what looked like a small, old-timey, wooden garage door at the back of the blind alley; like something you’d see in a mafia movie or ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’. “We’re not gonna say hi?”

“We’re a little pressed for time, Slayer,” Spike reminded her grimly, sidling along in the building’s shadow. While she watched with interest he bent over in front of the door, his blanket sliding back over his neck like a fallen hood, and set his shadowed hand to the metal handle. Yanked up. 

It rattled, but didn’t budge. “Fuck. Bloody thing’s locked.”

“At least he’s taking good care of your car?”

“Yeah, sure. Except I don’t have any of my sodding tools…”

“Tools… as in burglary tools?”

He straightened to throw her a seriously impatient look. “No; fucking dynamite, Slayer. Of course I mean lock-picks and the like! Only I didn’t have…”

“Don’t you just, like… break doors down?”

She was favored with an expression made up of extreme disapproval. “Sure, when it’s called for, but sometimes you want in an’ out with a bit more subtlety, yeah? Don’t wanna make a great bleeding ruckus. Aside from Clem bein’ a friend, so that I don’t wanna wreck his place.” He grunted as he regarded the stubborn portal. “And any road, pickin’ a lock’s a soddin’ art.” He turned back to the giant door, gave it another frustrated and fruitless tug. Let it go and shoved a hand through his (seriously out of control) hair, obviously at his wits’ end. “Now’s a time when I need the subtlety, since if I try to force it, all that old film stacked in the back’s liable to cascade down and blow up my bloody car…”

For some reason she was finding him really amusing and… okay. Kind of randomly endearing right now, which was probably a bad thing, but she couldn’t help it. “Well, we can’t have that. Even if it’s a heap…”

Her comment earned her serious glare-age.  _ “Classic,” _ he informed her firmly. “If it goes up in smoke because I couldn’t get inside a soddin’ door…” Making a wince-y sort of face, he pulled back his fist, clearly preparing to punch the lock right through the wood. His entire body was tense, like he was sure doing even that was risking his precious hotrod, and just, fine. He was an idiot.

“Oh, stop it, you dope.” Turning away, Buffy headed for the side-door they had just passed and knocked on it, three times, hard. “Hey, you. Clem?”

“We don’t have the bleedin’ time, Buffy!” Spike sounded positively alarmed. 

Buffy shook her head. “We also don’t have time to get blown up, or to traipse through half the sewers in the city because your car exploded. Also, I’m already sad about my new sneakers.” Something niggled in her chest, and she knocked hard again. “I know you’re probably ashamed to be seen with me, but them’s the breaks.” Besides, probably he was worried that that cut both ways, which...

Her words weren’t exactly a test, per se, but despite all that, Spike’s response was swift and immediate. “Don’t be daft, Slayer. You have no idea what the bloody hell you’re talking about. Clem’ll talk your ear off, try to invite you in for blind taste-tests, ask you to compare bloody Fiddle-Faddle to Crunch ‘n Munch to some other sodding shite that’s the same bleedin’ thing but with a different name to see if it’s any different to human taste buds, will want you to watch telly with him for hours…”

“He sounds seriously friendly. Hey! Knock knock, anybody home?”

A thick, nervous-sounding tenor whuffled through the crack in the door. “Uh… hi?”

“Hey. It’s Spike and the Slayer. We need his car, if that’s okay. Can you come unlock the garage door?”

A short, profound silence resounded inside the building, and then there came a sort of rusty  _ snicking _ noise, and the door opened a crack to reveal one very anxious-looking crimson eye surrounded by droopy, bumpy-looking flesh. “Uh, hey there, uh, Slayer?” The eye traveled up a little to take in the vampire who had since arrived at Buffy’s back. “Hey, Spike.”

“Clem. Long time no see.” Damn, he sounded tense.

“Yeah. Heard you got grabbed by those soldiers. Rough, buddy.”

“Yeah,” Spike agreed curtly. “Wouldn’t advise it.”

“Oh, for sure. I’ve been staying inside…” The red eye jerked back downward to meet Buffy’s. “Um, so… the car, huh?”

“Yeah. If you don’t mind. Spike’s scared to force the door in case it blows up those movie things…”

“‘Scared’s a strong word, Slayer…”

“…But we’re kind of in a hurry. You know, demon-bikers…”

The door opened a hair wider, revealing an altogether unassuming-looking face, totally squishy; really more like someone with really bad skin cancer than anything. Unless, you know, you paid too much attention to the floppy ears and the seriously pointed teeth. “Uh, yeah. Which is why I figured best to just not go outside at all right now. Did you see what they did to the houses across the street?” He shook his head solemnly, so that the four or so wattles of loose skin under his chin danced slowly in opposite directions. “Heard they hit Willy’s too. Poor guy. I hope he’s okay. And for sure there’ll be no poker till this mess gets cleaned up…”

“That’s the plan.” Buffy was trying for jaunty certainty. Hopefully if she shot with that for long enough, it would pan out.

Clem blinked at her optimism, then frowned uncertainly. “There’s a whole lot of ‘em, Slayer. Pretty scary bunch. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have all the faith in the world in you… but these guys are no joke. Be careful, okay?”

Okay, this had to be the nicest demon in the history of demons. If she read him right, he was being completely genuine in caring about her wellbeing as she prepped to go do battle, and that was… 

She was so not going to get emotional about it, but jeez. Some other  _ humans _ barely cared sometimes when she went into battle to save their butts; just sort of pushed her out of the door like her possible death and any sacrifices she might make were right and expected, her duty and thus barely worth discussing. /Can we say Watchers Council?/ It was kind of a big deal that a non-human, someone she might accidentally kill because of her training, could see past that and honor what she had to do, and to give up. It was almost too big for her to cope with, actually. “I’ll… try,” she managed. 

“She’ll come out right,” Spike informed the floppy-eared demon flatly. “No worries.” And it was then that Buffy realized that there was more than one demon who cared. Not only that, there was one who was determined to watch her back, see to it she came out the other side intact not just in body but in soul as well. 

She was so not going to get emotional. 

“‘F you don’t wanna come out, just pass me the keys. I’ll get ‘em back to you after the business is done.”

“Oh. Yeah. Sure.” Clem disappeared briefly, returned to the door to hold out a small ring of jangling metal. “It’s the black one.”

Spike snatched them and headed immediately back toward the garage, calling a brief, “Ta, mate!” over his shoulder.

“Sorry to grab and run,” Buffy told the quiet demon as she turned to follow him. “Duty calls.”

“No, I… I get it. But you should come back sometime! You like backgammon?”

Buffy felt her lips twitch at the thought of playing board games with this inoffensive, saggy creature. “You could probably teach me a thing or two.” Though she could take or leave trying to relax in a place filled with explosive cannisters of something as innocuous-looking as old film that could topple around them at any moment and end their lives mid-dice-roll.

“Oh, for sure. I mean, it’s no poker, but…” Clem looked briefly concerned. “Do you think they hurt Willy?”

“I’ll check in there first.” That was where Willow had said the jerks were holed up. Which made sense, what with the whole booze-factor. 

“Awesome. Chat later, Slayer!”

The door swung shut, and she heard the locks clicking madly closed once more.

Trotting away after Spike, Buffy reflected that cultivating a few demon friends might not actually kill her.

***

“…And then they took down Bone. Shot him all to hell.”

Razor could have chewed nails. He’d never seen Dome look so stinkin’ agitated. He’d for sure never heard the asshole talk so fucking much; not in his whole useless life. “Soldiers, you said?”

“They scragged him and kept his mule, boss.”

Alright, that cut it. Kill one of his boys, okay, but don’t keep his mule. “How the fuck,” Razor demanded ominously as he rose to his feet, “did these bastards manage to take our boy’s mule?”

“When I circled back there were seven of ‘em. All over it. Pullin’ it off their guy, haulin’ it, and Bone, off…”

Razor punched a hole in the bar wall. Bottles cascaded down around him to break on the floor. When he turned back, he knew his face was a rictus of rage. “Round up the boys. We’re goin’ to war.”

Panting, hunched around his bleeding belly, Dome nodded. “Yeah, boss.”

“And drink up, son, or you’ll never make it.”

Dome nodded again and shoved his fist harder against his paunch. “Yeah, boss.”

A clawed hand clenched Dome’s shoulder. “You came out alright. And we’ll get ‘em. We’ll get ‘em all. No one fucks with the Hellions; isn’t that right?”

Dome straightened, his bald head gleaming dully in the faint light from outside of the bar. “For sure, boss. We’ll fuck ‘em.”

“Damn straight.” Razor shoved a bottle of Jack into Dome’s free paw and shoved him back out the door. As the brother stumbled away to go round up the troops, Razor turned to the rat he had strung on the wall. Tapped one of his claws to his lips and tilted his head. “So. Willy.” Sidled a little closer. “Tell me about these ratfuck soldiers. And don’t hold anything back.”

Still dangling from darts and knives like a target, a sodden, shaking wreck, Willy eyed his approach like one would a rattlesnake. Razor smelled the despair there, the way fear had melted at this point into a sort of miasma of demoralization. The snitch had lost all hope now. Terror had become a background noise, he had been living in it for so long. He’d give anything up. “I don’t know who they are,” the mostly-human barkeep whispered immediately and without prevarication. “No one does. They grab up demons, and most of ‘em never come back. Rumor has it they do weird experiments on ‘em, like bein’ abducted.” A short, anxious chuckle, one that quickly dwindled to nothing. “No one knows where they’re hiding. No one really knows anything. They just got to town a few months ago, like maybe June? Or at least no one saw ‘em before that, but now everyone’s terrified of ‘em. No one knows much but that they seem to work around the college. That’s it. I swear…”

Razor sidled a little closer, drew one metal claw lovingly along the sweating cheek, over through lank hair, across the rat-like nose. “Oh, you better know more than that, Willy.”

The smell of terror bloomed again; a lovely aroma. “I swear on my mother, I don’t! That’s everything! Why would I hold back? I have no reason to protect those guys, they’re bad for business! They take all my clientele, scare everyone off so they don’t come in for drinks… Why would I lie? Why…”

Razor felt the smile cross his thin lips. “Guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”

* * *  
  
  
  
  
Poor Willy.  
yay Clem!  
Also... these last two chapters were short to make up for the fact that the next one is pivotal AF and is about seven million light-years long.  
  
  
  
  



	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all; sorry this is late. Been sick as a dog on some new med side-effects, and it's put me behind on posting. Sorry about that, I've just been so meh. 
> 
> Anyhoo, I hope you all enjoy this chapter a lot. It's The Big Turning Point. It's also long as bloody hell. But, one hopes, in that good way. 
> 
> One final disclaimer: So... when I wrote this, I was somehow convinced that Spike didn't have his duster when he was at Giles' place, that he'd left it behind when he'd been turned down by Harmony, or somehow lost it briefly in between the Initiative and his captivity before getting it back later. Not sure why I spaced him wearing it in Something Blue, but I'd gotten this image in my head of him in his blanket looking utterly tiny and vulnerable, and couldn't for the life of me recall the duster in that image in the slightest. So anyway... That part ended up being important in this story, and we're just gonna have to roll with... in this version, Spike's duster is in his former digs with Harmony; a minor change in continuity from canon to make him even more vulnerable than he was already. Because clearly in my head he was vulnerable AF in this arc between the Initiative and Doomed when he finds out he can hit back. 
> 
> This hiccup is no reflection on either of my betas, who are both stars. It all happened long before they were in the picture, lol.

“You wanna drive, luv?”

Buffy stared incredulously at Spike as he pocketed Clem’s keys. “You want me to drive your car?” At his wholly straight face she almost laughed, she was so uncomfortable. “You’re joking, right?”

He didn’t even crack a smile. “‘S not that far, pet. Almost a straight shot south…”

She turned a disbelieving eye on the painted windows, the hints of foil glinting through the gaps to catch stray daylight from outside in the alley. “You’re nuts!” 

He shrugged slightly, avoiding her eyes. “Still not in the best shape,” he admitted uncomfortably. 

/Eee./ Talk about a big concession. Whatever its state, it was obvious that he adored the massive old land yacht… and here he was, inviting her to wreck it for him. Just, no. “Um… If you, um, need me to then we’re seriously in trouble. I can barely drive a car  _ without _ blackened windows. I’d never get us there in one piece!”

He looked surprised at this confession. “You’ve a license, yeah?”

“That has zero relationship to my ability to navigate a moving vehicle.” /Seriously, how many guys do I have to tell in a week that I’m an avid pedestrian?/ That musing brought Riley Finn to mind for approximately the first time in two and a half days, and wow. She had not spared the hunky TA a single thought since… 

Well, since. And how bad was it that she found a neutered vampire with exceptionally hazy morals and whole busload of cutting snark far more stimulating company than a warm-blooded, husky guy with serious arms and good manners and an overriding, harmless sweetness, and… /Okay, I’m damaged or something. Just really, really messed up./ Because she was actually almost tempted to get in this monstrosity of a car and even  _ try _ to drive it for Spike right now, though the thought quite literally terrified her, while Riley’s unassuming, gentle suggestion of a driving date had struck her, earlier in the week, as innocuous and strangely dull; almost cloying. 

/That’s me. Excited by the fear of impending death./ “So as much fun as that sounds,” she heard herself continue, “it’s probably a better idea if we get to the house with both of us alive, not with you thrown through the window to turn into a little pile of dust on the median, and me all impaled on a piece of car wreckage because I missed a light.”

Spike actually grinned at her, apparently delighted by the random carnage her imagination could conjure up. “Look at you, Slayer; all concerned for me and my sweet ride.”

She mock-swung at his gut. Pulled up at the last minute to slap him lightly in the (just as a side-note, seriously toned) belly. “You missed the ‘impaled Buffy’ part of the equation.” 

“Didn’t. But that part’d never happen, pet. I’d sooner throw myself in front of you.”

/Okay, chivalry./ “You better watch what you say. The other demons might hear you and start getting funny ideas.” 

Spike grunted in clear unconcern. “They won’t mind at mo’. We all need you intact.” Turning for the driver’s side, he tugged the one old key from his jeans pocket and frowned pensively while he fingered it in clear indecision.

/Damn./ “If you need me to, I’ll take over,” she heard herself say, even though it was insane.

“That’s my girl.”

/Damn, damn, damn./ 

He yanked open the protesting door, bent to slip in. She watched the way he settled himself tentatively in the pilot’s seat… and he wasn’t even driving yet. And dammit, the hospital was so way out of the way, and they so needed to get him better blood. “Good thing you’re doing this,” she managed in level tones as she joined him inside, kicked aside a little trash (mostly empty Morleys packets and hollowed-out bottles), eyed the prehistoric dash. “No way I’d know what to do with all those knobs and… pully-things.”

He leaned forward distractedly, ran a caressing hand over the wood-looking panel around the steering wheel, like he was saying hi. Leaned back, gripped the wheel. Gave a sort of little nod. “Off again, old girl. Know it’s been a while, but…” And, shoving the key in, he set his feet on the pedals and did some kind of mystifying, complicated dance with his hands and feet… and was this a manual transmission? “Show me you love me.” And he turned the key.

The ancient engine roared to life like some kind of primeval monster. The growl of it, resounding in such a tiny, enclosed space, damn near deafened Buffy. And, yes, there was smoke. It sounded like a caged dragon. /Jeez!/ “Um, just for the record, this is definitely an all-you show. I so can’t drive stick.”

Spike smirked broadly, moved the thing attached to the steering wheel—wow, what a weird place for a shifter!—and gunned the engine. “Somehow I find that very hard to believe,” he deadpanned, and propelled the car out of Clem’s garage at about mach nineteen. 

Buffy would have gaped at him, if she wasn’t too busy clutching at the belt-less, black vinyl seats for dear life to keep from careening into the hard metal door, then him as they slewed around the corner and onto the main thoroughfare. She did, however, blush mightily.

“Lucky for us, this baby’s an automatic,” he went on blandly, and caressed his hand once, up and down the long shaft of the shifter, though he kept his eyes on the road. “Good thing too. Wouldn’t mind seein’ you drive, someday.”

Now _that_, she was pretty sure, was not about actual driving. Or maybe he just had her thinking all wrong. Either way, Buffy felt as though most of the wires in her brain had crossed incorrectly for a second, fizzled, and snapped into blackout. She simply could not process for a moment, and thus remained silent as they swung around corners with alarming speed. No quips or snark as she coped automatically with the clinking bottles rolling under her feet and listened to the stuff he had piled in the back seat slither around—probably everything he owned—as it threatened to pile off onto the floor.   
  
A curious glance behind her led to an education. Stacks of vinyl in lovingly-preserved cardboard sleeves met her eye. A haphazard pile of long-sleeved button-downs in burgundy, deep red, maroon, and a few in royal purple and dark blue, sliding off of a few pairs of worn black jeans. A couple of boxes on the floor concealing who-knew-what, their lids askew, but not enough to reveal their contents.  /I wonder what’s in…/   
  
/No, you know what?  I probably shouldn’t be mentally poking through his belongings./ 

She knew what she was doing. Trying not to think about what he was saying. Not that that stopped her from craning her neck around to blink down at the half-open carton behind his seat… which was why she almost landed on his lap when he slewed around onto what she presumed must have been Garcia. /Shit!/

She really needed to pay more attention to hanging on to her door, and do less to prying into his private life. Cue more blushes, especially when he threw a smirk in her general direction that looked pleased at her lack of balance and its results. Damn him. 

Luckily, Buffy swiftly forgot to be horrified-secretly-maybe-pleased by his (such a pig but there’s also such a thing a straightforward charm) flirting (flirting? Just flat-out putting it out there?) as they progressed further into town. Especially when it occurred to her, maybe a little belatedly, that that was basically the way he had always flirted with her, only less with the violence now and more with the outright innuendo. She had just never recognized it before because he used to camouflage it better, make it more about fighting and… and… /And he’s probably flirting with me again now to, like, reclaim some normalcy in his life or something. That’s all. Don’t make a big thing of it./

As they finally hit a nice straightaway she turned away a little, irritated by her blindness. She could use the diversion of some recon, so she tugged aside a tiny patch of aging foil and scratched off a little bit of the truly haphazard paint-job in order that she might look out… only to have scenes of devastation unscroll before her in increasing numbers.   
  
Whole neighborhoods had been marked by demon-biker depredations, while whole swaths of town had so far been spared. Probably not for long, though, considering how thorough they had been with the ones they  _ had _ hit; because those? Had been hit  _ hard _ . Burn-marks on the businesses, broken windows everywhere, cars with every light and mirror shattered, fire on every other corner. It looked like Buffy’s vague, childhood memory of LA after the Rodney King riots, except there was literally no one on the streets. Not even any motorcycles buzzing around in the distance. She thought she heard one once, and all her instincts told her to give chase, but… /Not yet. Need a plan first. Need to gather the troops. Need to… be ready. Find ‘high ground’, gain the advantage…/ 

It was just really horrifying that only a few demons could have done this much damage in one night. She found herself praying, hard, that her own neighborhood had been one of the ones that had been spared Hellion attentions, because if they’d gotten to Mom during all this...

“We’ll fix it, luv.”

Buffy closed her eyes to shut it out, nausea roiling in her gut. “If I hadn’t been distracted…”

“Fuck that.”

Her eyes snapped open, her mouth snapped bitchiness before she could stop it. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you think they would have tried this if I was around, visible, doing my job? If they didn’t think the town was wide open, ripe for the taking.” 

He remained silent, like a painful confirmation. Feeling it like a brand, like a betrayal, she shot him a sharp glance… and saw his expression. The pain there, written all over his drawn features. /Oh. Oh God./ How that must have sounded to him… “I’m… I’m not saying I regret… staying. It’s just…”

“That whole ‘when the sheriff’s out of town’ bit, pet… You can’t take that rot to heart. They know you’re in college, yeah? That you’re not about as much anymore. They’ll have cased the place.”

The comment surprised her briefly out of her funk. “What, you mean did their homework?”

He didn’t look at her, eyes on the road and pain of more than one sort etched on his cut-glass features. “Bloody reason they took so long to find out what happened to their missing mates, I reckon. But once they found out the rumors were true and you’re not patrolling every soddin’ night…” She winced, but he plowed on anyway, doggedly. “They’d have tried this anyway, luv. And it isn’t as if you oughtn’t to be allowed to have a break once in a while. What happens if you take a sodding trip some bloody time, or go to visit a relative out of state? What then?”

She opened her mouth to rebut his words, could find nothing to say. He followed up his advantage before she could think past the whirl of his irritatingly articulate arguments. “So this is where you decide, from here on out. You gonna beat yourself over the head with it for the rest of your life if somethin’ goes down whenever you take a moment for Buffy? You gonna buy into those sods tellin’ you you don’t deserve to go to school or have a bleedin’ life, like all the other poor chits before you, meant to have nothin’ but to die young fightin’? No life, no love; nothin’ but the Calling?” 

/Like Kendra, he’s saying. But… it’s not all or nothing. Is it?/

“Nothin’ but what they tell you to do. Never leave again, feel guilty whenever you take a soddin’ nap, till you’re so worn down to the nub that you’re a ghost of yourself?”

Okay, now he was being downright ridiculous. “C’mon, Spike. There’s a difference between taking care of myself so I can keep fighting, and just being selfish…”

“Oh, sure,” he bit out. “So, long as you can justify it as keepin’ you fit for the fight, then it’s alright. But physically fit, not emotionally. And what of your soul?”

She almost snapped at him, demanded to know what he knew about having a soul, but she bit off the protest… because he was making too much damned sense again, the stupid vampire. How did he always  _ do _ that?

“You can’t soddin’ save everybody, Buffy. You can’t catch everything. There’re thousands of evils, believe me. Some so amorphous you could never see ‘em comin’; some from outside so you couldn’t predict ‘em before they strike if you had an alarm. Other dimensions, or just out of town, droppin’ in from above like this, ambush-style. This isn’t  _ on _ you!” He sounded so incredibly frustrated. “You’re just one chit, no matter how tough.” 

Something broke around her; some huge, heavy weight that had always lain on her shoulders, dragging her down. 

“Dunno why you’re buyin’ into this buggerin’ martyr complex of theirs, but it’s a bleedin’ impossible standard, luv. It’s gonna kill you even if the job doesn’t; and you’re worth more’n that.” His eyes darted over to hers, away from the road. “You couldn’t have known what was going to happen.” He yanked the wheel over, and the massive car swung wide around the bend toward Camden. “One bloody bird in all the sodding world.” He scoffed derisively. “Beginning to think the gits as made you are a right bunch of tossers, putting so much on the shoulders of one young girl. Bastards, the whole bleedin’ lot of ‘em, to make you feel this much guilt because you went radio-silent for less than forty-eight to care for a friend in need.”

He was saying a whole heck of a lot she had never even dared to consider. It felt like rebellion. It felt like insurrection, like mutiny… Like taking back her weary acceptance of her role. It felt like running away again. 

“Soddin’ hell; they gonna put you in the bloody ‘lectric chair next, you have to take a mo’ because Red gets mono and you need to nurse her a bit, or summat? Or  _ you _ do? Though, come to that, dunno if a Slayer can get mono…” He shot her a faint glare. “Probably depends on who you snog…”

Buffy returned his expression with a faint, open-mouthed awe, overwhelmed by his impromptu diatribe, by the very vehemence of it. 

“Or what if the Boy gets a broken bone or five one of these years—which he’s like to do with the way he carries on like a nit, thinkin’ he can keep up. Amazed he hasn’t already—or if Watcher has a soddin’ heart attack one of these fine days and needs you to sit by his bedside for a day or two and fuck the rest of these idjits.” 

/Oh God, what if Giles ever  _ did? _ Or Xander… He already had that broken arm, and he so could get hurt again, any time…/ And by that very token she was helpless to refute Spike’s ironclad reasoning. 

/I have friends, family, connections to the world. They're my strength. They keep me alive when my spirits are about to fail me… but to the Council they’re totes unorthodox, because I will  _ always _ hesitate when it comes down to the wire. I will always want to put them first. Because to save them is to save myself, and to let them die is to die inside. I can’t do that and keep doing this./ “I… I guess maybe you’re right,” Buffy murmured. “To a certain extent.”

“You’re bloody right I’m right,” Spike grumbled. “Soddin’ hypocrites, tellin’ you to live like a boarhound and a nun all in the same package.”

Despite the devastation all around them, she couldn’t help the shocked laugh that exploded from her lips. “Well, I’m definitely not cut out to be a nun.”

His mouth curled up into a slight, secret, evocative smile. “Didn’t figure you to be.” 

By the time they had passed Twentieth, Buffy was tired of wincing at the wreckage around her. She fought to stare straight ahead at the blacked-out windshield. It was easy to ignore the smallish hole she had scratched into the black paint on her safe, western window. 

“Turn on the radio, luv. I’ll even let you pick the station, if it’ll relax you.”

Her stoic gaze jerked away from her visual death-match with a piece of extraneous foil. “Wh…”

His eyes flicked to hers, and wow, she had forgotten how bright blue they could be out of the gloom of a dingy motel. Even here in the overwarm, dim confines of his tobacco-and-alcohol-smelling car, there was enough light diffusing through the vamp-saving screening to light him in a faint glow, and he was…

/I really was fighting the world’s stupidest losing battle, wasn’t I, lying to myself about him being gross or whatever dumbass crap, not admitting even to myself how pretty he is?/ And the worst damned part was, she couldn’t even muster the energy to be angry at herself anymore for the observation, much less ashamed. At least, not beyond that initial kneejerk reaction that was so heavily drilled into her psyche by this point that it was damn near inborn. “We have a battle to get to, and you want me to listen to  _ music?” _

He smiled again, and his hand shot out past her, toward the beat-up glove box. Twisted it open, eyes flickering over. “Any smokes in there, pet?”

With a put-upon sigh, she fumbled inside, found a crumpled pack with maybe one or two stale cigarettes rattling around inside. “Are you seriously gonna hotbox me in here when I can’t roll down the windows? Because if you do I will, and you and your little flaming deathsticks can be ashes together.”

He pouted, pulled out the two cigarettes one-handed with what looked like way-too-dexterous fingers, slid them one-by-one behind each ear. “I’ll save ‘em for later.” He nodded at the radio. “Go on then. I use the Ramones to juice up before a fight, but no doubt you’ll choose somethin’ angsty and Pop-Rock, or some bird-anthem…”

Buffy shot him a narrow glare. “A, it’s called ‘Alternative Rock’…”

“Load of whining by grown men…”

“Just because you have no taste. And B,  _ ‘bird-anthem’?” _

His grin broadened. “Put it on, then, pet, and let me see you get vicious.”

Now he was just trying to start a fight. Refusing to give him the satisfaction, she leaned forward, cranked on the ancient stereo, fiddled with the dial… and halted instantly when she heard the beginnings of her absolute favorite Meredith Brooks jam. “Okay, here’s a chick-anthem for you. Deal.” And she let the rousing lyrics of ‘Bitch’ soar through her bones. God, she wanted to dance right now. Just really cut loose. 

“Gonna put on a show for me, Slayer?”

“I’m sure you’d love that.” She quivered, fighting to hold herself together. God, she adored this song. 

“Like the lyric, I’ll admit.” He rolled his tongue pointedly. “Though, can’t say I think you’re all that innocent and sweet.” 

She barely heard him. The chorus was coming, and…

Okay, she couldn’t help it. She was going to have to dance. And sing along. And he was really just going to have to deal.

She closed her eyes and lost it next to him on the seat. As always, music and movement was her way to escape the pressures of her life. Well, she was starting to learn another way, but so far that was kind of a baby steps thing, and in the meantime… “‘I do not feel ashamed! I’m your hell, I’m your dream…’”

As the next verse came in Buffy rocked a little, let her eyes fall open. And saw Spike watching her once more with something that looked like anguish, and also like defeat. “What?”

“Bloody fuck,” he whispered.

Okay, he was making her self-conscious. “Watch the road or we’ll crash.”

God, his eyes were so… liquid. “You ask a lot, luv,” he told her, very, very quietly, but turned away again to peer through his tiny slit of window. 

She almost didn’t dance anymore, barely sang. Tough to, watching him watch her at every opportunity. Till the end, because she just really loved the end. “‘When you hurt, when you suffer, I’m your angel undercover…’” Saw him shiver. “‘You know I wouldn’t want it any other way…’”

He swerved the car, apparently to avoid something. Probably he was a little distracted. The heavy axles jolted over a rough dip in the street and he winced badly, knuckles going white on the wheel. Hissing a little, he cranked the wheel with exquisite care to turn them into the marching curve of familiar palms that, glimpsed through Buffy’s few window-holes, announced the origin of Revello Drive. 

Another song kicked off; something newer. Buffy was no longer paying attention. /I need you in one piece, and not hurting anymore. You need better blood to be okay./ There was one very obvious answer to that puzzle, if she trusted him enough to take it. /I’d have to control it. I’d have to… I can’t do it the same way again. I just… Can’t go there. Not this time. Not that he even _can_ right now. But at least…/

Nothing else was working. Nothing else would work fast enough. And they just didn’t have time to make the side-trips to try the thing that might. 

/Once I do this, there’s no going back. He’ll be mine./

Which was a really stupid thing to think, because he already was. 

He pulled the DeSoto into the driveway behind Mom’s Jeep, clambered stiffly out with the blanket slung over his head to jog awkwardly for the shade of the carport. Buffy followed, watching him for signs that he was in any way better, but he didn’t seem to be. That bump hadn’t done him any favors, either. /Okay, then. Motion passed. We are resolved./ 

She just had to do it before the rest of the gang got here, or there would be too much fighting and ranting about it, and she absolutely didn’t have the time to deal with that battle with this looming one on the horizon. /One war at a time, dammit!/ And besides; Spike was right. Her personal life and what she did with her body and… and her heart… 

Should they really get a say on that as long as she… As she was sure it was safe? She should know the difference, right? /After all, I’ve already been there. He’s right. I’ve  _ lived _ the difference./ 

Sidling up to the back porch, they made the quick dash to the kitchen door. Which was prudently locked. Spike was already smoking as Buffy banged on it. “Mom!” Shot Spike a peremptory glare. “Get back under cover!” she hissed. “Once she opens…”

The door was flung wide before he could respond. “Buffy! Oh my God, baby, where in God’s name…” Her eyes widened when she took in the blanket-draped, smoldering Spike. 

“I’ll explain later,” Buffy muttered urgently and, grabbing her slowly barbecuing vamp, dragged him bodily inside. “Get  _ in _ here, you doof.”

He blinked in surprise to find no barrier, stumbled a little upon crossing the threshold, righted himself and looked around the kitchen with wonder while Buffy yanked her mother in behind them and slammed the door shut, deadbolted it. “I hardly think that counts as an invite, luv.”

“I never disinvited you.”

“Oh?” He started preening.

“Oh, c’mere, smirky. And stop with the smug looks. Hey, Mom?” 

Mom was still staring at her, looking more than a little at a loss. “Yeah, Buffy?”

“Do you have any mugs you don’t care if we stain?”

“Wh… Oh. Um… Maybe the one Aunt Debbie sent that one year with that hideous parrot…”

Buffy set out for the cupboards. “You remember Spike,” she threw over her shoulder with an offhand gesture as she poked in the cup one.

“Oh, yes, of course,” Mom answered, striving to regain her equanimity, and turned her gaze to their surprise visitor. “Hello again, young man. How are things?” 

Spike shrugged off the blanket and stomped casually on one singed spot, smushing out most of the burning polyester stink. Rubbed one hand through his untamed mane, obviously a little out of countenance at having been thrust in front of Buffy’s mother so un-coiffed. And, you know, probably having anyone call him ‘young man’. /Ha!/ He didn’t say anything to refute it, though, which… Well. Buffy kind of thought Spike admired her mom, actually. He seemed strangely shy and out of his element, now that she had turned back to watch. “Oh, I’ve been better, Joyce, but I’ll do. Thanks very much for askin’…”

“He’s been through the wringer,” Buffy interrupted bluntly. “Spike. We only have a few minutes, tops, before everyone gets here.” She shot a quick glance at her mother, made a face. “Sorry, Mom. Right now this is headquarters, till we deal with this invasion. And I’m super sorry I’ve been incommunicado…”

“About that, Buffy…”

“I’ll tell you why later. Ish.” Even with that, Spike’s shoulders had gone stiff as a board. “But there’s no time now. I have to fix Spike up before everyone gets here and we have to come up with a battle plan…”

“A battle plan? Buffy, have you seen those… Those…”

“Believe me, I have. Up close and personal. And I so don’t want a repeat, but till we can get rid of the jerks, I think it’s kinda necessary.”

Spike was eyeing her with clear suspicion as she approached him. “Slayer, what…”

She shot him a quelling look. “I want you to be in shape to fight. No more hurting.” She set the ugly coffee mug on the counter at his elbow with a dull  _ clunk _ . “So here. Don’t make a big thing of it.”

Spike’s eyes jerked to the cup. Narrowed. “Oh, hell no,” he ground out.

“And don’t fight with me.” Figured that he would. As if there was time for that crap. “Actually, though…” Buffy looked around her at the bright, diffuse light of the kitchen. “I think we’d better… um… Take this somewhere more private…” She blushed slightly. “I mean, I don’t want just anyone walking in, and with everyone on their way… Besides, I don’t want Mom to watch.”

Mom’s voice went taut. “You don’t want me to watch what, exactly?”

Spike closed his eyes as if to hide from her confused regard. “Oh, Christ…”

“Tell me it won’t work,” Buffy threw back, as intensely.

He had no answer to that. Nodding, she turned on her heel and headed for the knife drawer.

Mom’s voice took on an alarmed cast. “Buffy Anne Summers, you get away from those knives! What on Earth…”

Buffy didn’t even pause. “This is important, Mom. Necessary. I don’t have time to explain. I need everyone. I especially need Spike, and he’s injured. I’ve been trying to get him back on his feet for two days, but I’m out of time.” She swung back around, a small, excruciatingly sharp paring knife in hand. “Spike?”

He pushed slowly away from the counter. She thought he was shaking. “Buffy, luv, you don’t have to do this.”

“I know.”

“Buffy, honey, please tell me… If you’re in some kind of trouble…” Mom’s eyes flicked to Spike, jerked away. “If… If this vampire is…”

Buffy saw the pained look in Spike’s eyes, knew in that instant that she was going too fast at his expense, just to save herself a fight. /Dammit./ He really, really liked her mom, and it wasn’t fair of her to poison his relationship with her just to get out of something she didn’t want to deal with.

Sighing heavily, she set down the knife. Turned to her mother, took both her hands in her own. “Mom, can you please trust me? I need to give a little blood to Spike. Just a tiny bit; like, I dunno…” She flickered her eyes at him, trying to judge magickal Slayer-blood potency. If still a bit hungry, he was no longer starving, per se. It wasn’t about enormous quantity so much as quality. “A quarter of a cup?” He gave a little, doubtful sort of nod. She jerked her eyes back to Mom, steady and sure. “A half, tops, and then we’ll be back down. My blood’s super-potent, especially for vamps…”

“Wait, back down?”

“Yeah, back down?”

“From my room.”

“Okay, hold on just one minute, young lady. You want me to let you go upstairs to your room with Spike… No offense, Spike. I like you, but you  _ are _ a vampire…”

“None taken, Joyce.”

“…So you can… cut yourself and… feed him some of your… your blood…”

“Just a little bit of it,” Buffy repeated in hopefully-soothing tones. “But, you know, you don’t need to  _ see _ it…”

“Oh, I think I most certainly do.”

Buffy gaped at her mother. “Mom, I…”

Spike’s low rumble of warning broke right through her protests. “If Joyce wants to be witness to this, then she most certainly should be given that option. This is, after all, her home; and you are after all her daughter, for all you’re damn near nineteen and livin’ on your own. An’ I’d imagine she’d know whether the sight of blood would make her pass out, by this stage of the game.” 

Oh, he was so trying to get back on Mom’s good side, the jerk. Buffy really didn’t want to do this in front of her mother. Now she felt totally ganged up on… but she was also no dummy. Mom was back to looking at Spike with that crazy mom-approval look of hers, which was, of course, making Spike look relieved and even a hair pleased, and jeez. /He so wants to make her happy, even more than me. I can lump it. Just, wow. I guess he figures he can wheedle back onto my good side later with a bunch of insults and asshole flirting and… And… backhanded compliments and…/ 

Moving jerkily, Buffy turned away to grab up the discarded knife. And felt Spike’s hand close over her wrist. “Give us a mo’ Joyce, will you?” 

“We don’t have ti… Spike, what are…” He was tugging her away from the counter, past the basement door and toward the hall to the living room. “What the hell?” she demanded.

“Only, I need you to know something,” he grated, and wow. He was practically vibrating with tension. He ran his fingers through his hair again, so that it ran riot all around his head like a curly halo. 

“Okay, what? You’re worrying me.” There was nothing of the bravado and the sneers and the… No Spike-shell on him at all right now. This was all earnestness and steadfast blue eyes and naked warning. 

“Oh, hell.” He drew his lower lip briefly into his teeth, hesitated slightly, then… “Slayer blood’s an aphrodisiac, Buffy, is the thing.”

Whatever she had expected, it was so not that. Predictably, Buffy felt her cheeks heat. “Oh?” she asked, and fiddled with the knife in her hand for something to do. He sounded so damned…  _ conversational _ . On the surface, anyway. Underneath…

Underneath, his eyes were rampaging with emotion. “Yeah. It is. And I’ve been holdin’ back. You know it. Pretendin’ a bit, for your sake. But I have that in me… I won’t be able to pretend anymore.”

/Shit, shit, shit…/ 

She let out a heavy breath and closed her eyes, because she knew, now he was making her face it. Knew the thing that he had been trying to tell her all those times, back in that nasty motel. This was no easy flirtation, Spike-style. This was… 

This was fair warning. He  _ wanted _ her. He had been giving her the option, giving her little hints, but… He for realsies wanted her, and with a big steaming cup of Slayer blood chasing itself through his veins like… like a drug, he’d be… 

“Won’t touch you, you don’t want it. You know that. But Christ, pet; it’ll be hard not to. And I won’t be able to lie to save your sensibilities. Not after this.” A short, pregnant pause. “Not ever again.”

/Oh God./ 

She balanced on a fraught teeter-totter for a moment, wavering. But she needed him. Needed him whole. Except… “It’s… not really fair to you, is it?” she asked quietly.

Her eyes snapped open in surprise when he scoffed loudly. “You’re offerin’ me your blood—Slayer’s blood, Buffy Summers’ blood—freely given, no strings, and you think I’m gonna bewail any opportunity to have at it, no matter what the bloody hell it does to me? Christ, pet; give it here!” He waved a hand back toward the kitchen, peremptory and with eyes blazing, like a total masochist.

She stared at him, stunned. “You’d… put yourself through that, even though you know…” She bit her lip. Moment of truth. He wasn’t asking, but the moment demanded that she admit to things she hadn’t been at all prepared to face. “That I’m not sure, or ready, or…”

“Been through worse. I’ll live.” His eyes on hers blazed with terrifying promise. “I just wanted you to know.”

She could breathe. She  _ could _ . 

When they regained the kitchen, it was all she could do to approach the counter once more, lift the knife, face the mug. But time was seriously running out on them, and… She wouldn’t regret it, no matter what happened. This felt like one of those inexorable, kismet moments in her life; like sooner or later, at some point in her time with this vampire, she would eventually have given of her blood to heal him, maintain him, keep him. It was just… in this moment, it was now. “Okay,” she whispered, and lifted the thin, gleaming blade.

“Buffy, are you  _ sure?” _ Mom asked, and her voice quavered just slightly.

As if the question was all she needed to hear to know the truth of it, Buffy nodded her certitude. “Yeah. I am.” And drawing in a deep, fortifying breath, she dragged the knife, hard and swift, across the inside of her left arm. Hurriedly held the welling slice over the lip of the mug so she wouldn’t lose any drips onto the counter. Hopefully it would bleed enough, before Slayer-healing closed it, and she would still be able to fight without it getting in the way.

Off to one side, Mom jumped and made a pained sound. 

Closer to, Spike hissed. And his nostrils flared greedily. “Christ, oh Christ, pet…”

“Shouldn’t be long now,” Buffy informed him stoically, and prodded at the burning lips of the shallow wound to keep it flowing. Watched the level rise. About a quarter now. A little more. A little more… There. That should do it. Which was good, because she was starting to peter out already. “Spike. Come here. Tell me if this is gonna be enough, or if I need to reopen…”

He drew close, moving very carefully, as if he didn’t want to crowd her or make her startle. Peered into the mug without touching it. Nodded… and instead of grabbing it up, caught up her dripping forearm. Cradled it, wrist in one hand and elbow in the other. “I can close it, luv.”

She blinked at him, surprised, but in some strange, distant way. “You can?”

His eyes remained on her wound, but not in an intent way so much as in an ‘avoiding her eyes’ kind of way. “Mm. Got a coagulant in my saliva…”

Which should definitely gross her out, but instead she was arrested by the sheer logistical inanity of it. “Okay, that makes less than zero sense. You know that, right?”

He lifted his gaze to meet hers then, and his quiet smile seemed to seep into her bones as he waited, hovering over her sliced flesh. “Why’s that, Buffy?” God, he was literally humming with eagerness to lick her clean; like a cat or something, but he wasn’t going to touch her without her permission. And there was like a half a mug of her blood just  _ sitting _ there—the smell of it had to be driving him out of his mind—but here he was, just  _ looking _ at her like she was the center of the universe or something. 

It should freak her. It should. “Oh, you know,” she managed, feeling lightheaded, but not from blood-loss. “Why should something that lives on exsanguination evolve a way to  _ stop _ the bleeding…”

“Sometimes you want to, if you’re amongst friends.” A sound had started to emerge from his throat; one that sounded dangerously like a purr, and, okay, wow. She hadn’t actually  _ meant _ it when she had mentally compared him to a feline, but… “It’s only on my tongue. The fangs and all the rest do the opposite. It’s really a very efficient system.”

/Oh. Oh, wow./ He was going to close it with his  _ tongue _ . And she was so not ready for this. Like not even a little. Except, “Okay,” her traitorous mouth pronounced for her, automatically, because it had less than zero shame. And apparently her brain had just taken a complete vacation, because she could only watch him move, his body bending in slow-motion through the diffuse light from the thin muslin of the kitchen curtains. The warm glow gave the moment a sense of fuzzy unreality… until the very instant his mouth touched her skin. 

Then her distant, floaty brain slammed into her body like a meteor called home by the paradox of cool fire, and she was lost in the ten thousand fractured, disparate sensations of that one, tiny, pinpoint-slow massage. Because, no shit; his tongue  _ thrummed _ there for a second, and how did a tongue even  _ do _ that, and what was he even trying to  _ tell _ her? And his eyes were on hers, never left hers as he started from the bottom of her forearm, caught the one drip from the insanely thin skin over her ulna and then traveled up; just the tip of his tongue, tracing along the ticklish path of the drip till it found the cut. 

Her eyes fell closed for a moment… and he halted. Completely. 

Breathing a little too fast, her eyes snapped back open to stare at him in shock. And she felt him grin against her flesh. /Oh my God, you are  _ such _ an asshole!/

Apparently she was required to keep looking at him while he… While he… /Oh God…/ 

His tongue continued its journey now; lighter and lighter, almost too lightly. Brushed the edges of the cut.

Her body bucked a little, involuntarily, at the overwhelming, twin sensations of pain and arousal as he moved, slow and sensuous, over the hot, abraded flesh. Felt his fingers dig in, sharp reminders to her or maybe to himself; holding her steady at elbow and wrist… and swore she could feel the damaged edges knitting behind his passage. His teeth scraped along behind, lightly, to cure the intense itch, and… And she was breathing too hard. And she was abruptly sopping wet and throbbing, and this was probably totally fucked up and… and…

He slowly released her wrist. Let go of her arm completely. Unbent, eyes locked on hers; intensely blue, like the insides of a sun-warmed glacier. “All better now,” he whispered huskily.

It was entirely possible that she might never breathe again. She had never had such an intensely sensual experience in her entire life to date—and that counted sex; either time—making out with anyone at all, masturbation with  _ anything _ … or even that time she’d worn that chenille sweater without a bra, or skinny-dipped in a hot-tub when she was just a teensy bit plastered. 

She was most definitely not ‘all better now’. Probably wouldn’t be for a while. Not till she killed several somethings. Or lost her mind and jumped on him. Or…

A very tiny, very uncomfortable, and very recognizable sound jerked Buffy’s gaze away from rapt, breathless, possibly permanent appreciation of Spike’s ridiculous baby blues, and… /Oh God, Mom’s here; she’s right  _ there _ , this is  _ Mom’s _ kitchen, we’re doing this in front of  _ Mom _ , in the  _ kitchen _ …/ 

She had  _ so _ known they should’ve gone upstairs.

Making a show of unconcern he very obviously didn’t feel, Spike reached out for the mug on the counter. Caught it up one-handed, lifted it in a sort of jaunty toast. “Cheers, luv,” he murmured, and there was inordinate feeling in his voice as he brought it to his lips. 

“Are you sure?” she asked softly; though, really, barn door, horse.

“You barmy?” he demanded, still smiling like a loon. “Not gonna waste it, Slayer. This shite’s like gold.” He inhaled above the lip of the mug, long and slow like he was at a wine-tasting or something. “Christ; better than. Soddin’ platinum.” 

Dang. He actually looked awed, standing there holding a cheap mug of barely any of her blood, so that she felt strangely touched by his valuation of her gift. It made her wish she had done this hours ago. Yesterday. “I’m sorry I took so long to do it.”

“Hush.” And he drank. And visibly shuddered in ecstasy as it went down. He didn’t even make a pretense at it, and thank goodness he was facing her and not Mom, because that was a straight up O-face, or what she would imagine his O-face would look like when he…

She blushed mightily, but it was true. She just really had in no way realized before now just how  _ sexual _ the whole blood-drinking thing was for him. /Of course, I wouldn’t have, since I’ve been watching him eat something that tastes uber-nasty to him./ When you threw in the whole Slayer-blood thing on top of however long of him not even having had  _ human _ blood… 

He could have quaffed it in seconds, but instead he completely savored it, even closing his eyes very briefly at the end and giving a little shiver. And when he reopened them…

/Oh. My. God./ 

It should be  _ illegal _ to look at anyone like that. As far as his eyes were concerned, he had already tossed her onto the floor and proceeded to have his wicked way with her, and their bodies were simply seriously slow to catch up, and, just…

“Are you two… in a relationship? Because if you’re in a relationship with another vampire, Buffy, that’s all well and good, but the fact that you didn’t  _ tell _ me…”

/There wasn’t  _ time! _ I didn’t even know  _ myself _ until…/

“What I used to live on was bright, compared to what I have been,” Spike whispered, completely ignoring Mom. “But this wasn’t…” He shook his head a little, looking dazed. “You’re like a star, blazing right through my being. And this isn’t…” His voice trembled slightly. “It’s like bloody communion. Christ, I’m so lost, luv. Gone round the bloody twist, never be the same.” He pulled in a hard breath. “So fucking gone on you, Buffy.”

Her hands shook. “Oh God…” 

“So many things I’ve meant to say to you, the last couple of days, but couldn’t. ‘S been killin’ me, luv. Long, slow way to die, but I wouldn’t trade it. Then it started to seem like… maybe you weren’t just carin’ for me out of pity…”

Buffy closed her eyes, shaking. “I wasn’t,” she whispered, and the confession racked her.

“Look at me. Please?”

The thought of Spike actually using that word shocked her to the core, and she could not but oblige, stunned. His eyes on hers were fathomless, filled with more emotions than she knew how to read. “I’ve always been the one to care for others. Do you know that, Buffy? I’ve never… been cared for. Not save out of duty, or because someone needed me to be well just to make use of me. That you…” His entire being turned pleading underneath a thin veneer of shattered, barely-patched armor. “Know you need me whole, to fight at your side; and I’ll do it. Christ knows I’ll be whatever you need me to be. Whatever the Slayer needs… but the girl? Want to be what she needs too, if you’ll have me. If…” He actually swallowed, more vulnerable than he had been the first night she had found him at the motel. “If you ever say you want me for… more than just the fight...”

/Ohgodohgodohgod…/ He was rendering all her excuses moot. Had reft her, very neatly, of every hiding place and avoidance tactic. To use even a one would break him. He’d stay, help, but after that he’d go, and… “You know… it’s more than that.”

He let out a breath. Nodded. Moved a little closer, took up her right hand. She felt numb, about as responsive as a doll as he did, and god, he was so  _ earnest _ . “Buffy,” he said softly, “I’m already ruined. You know that, right? You know things I’d as soon no one else knows. You’ve seen them, even if I never spoke a word about why they’re there. Turnin’ me into…” He shook his head grimly then. “No, that’s not even fair. Am what I am. Can’t fight it. Have done, for a hundred soddin’ years.” He pulled in a sharp, harsh breath, and drew her chilled hand up in his. Laid it over his chest where his unbeating heart lay, and drilled his gaze right through hers, making directly for her heart. “I could be real good to you, pet.”

Panic flooded her. He was pleading, and oh god… Oh no… “Spike. Don’t do this. Please? Not now…”

His mouth tightened with the realization that he was pushing too hard, too fast. He bulled on despite, holding hard onto her spooked eyes. “What’s the worst that could happen? Don’t have a soul to lose. What you see is what you get. And you know I’ll live on what you need me to. Fight at your side, since we know I can now. Fast. Wicked fighter. Almost as strong as you; you said it. Be a help, since it’ll give me something to do. Christ, luv; give me somethin’ to  _ do!” _

“Spike,” she breathed again,  _ “please _ …”

“I won’t leave,” he told her softly, and his heart was in his eyes. The one she had seen for two days, the one she could no longer deny. The one that had stayed with another woman, a crazy-woman, for over a century, let her use him and cast him aside, and had loved her anyway. That heart was now turned solely on her; and that was  _ terrifying _ . “It would be so  _ easy _ , Buffy. Like breathin’. Sure, we’d fight, but that’d be part of the fun. And you know you can’t shake me anyway. Said it yourself; I always come back. Even Dru said it; saw me comin’ to you. ‘S why she tossed me out. Why I left.” 

/It’s why…/

/Drusilla  _ saw _ …/

He drew in a shuddering breath, and it seemed to amplify everything, because he shouldn’t need to breathe. He shouldn’t need to… “You  _ know _ me. I don’t leave. Haven’t been able to leave this soddin’ town for more’n a few months since I set eyes on you, no matter how bleedin’ hard I try. Only reason I’d go is if I was sent away.” His eyes went dark then. “Hell… maybe I was ready to go when it came to Dru, because even if you sent me off, I don’t think I could.” He closed them in apparent anguish, shook his head, pain limning every line of his body. His jaw tightened till the muscle in his cheek ticced, and it was clear when he next spoke that he had loosed it with an effort. “I’m not the type as walks away, so if that’s what you need…”

It was. He was offering her everything she needed, everything she had ever wanted, and how was he so eerily right in his read of her? “Spike…” she whispered again, devastated by the certainty of it, the weight of his words.

“You can’t chase me off, Slayer,” he whispered softly. “‘M not leavin’, any road, so you’ll have to accept me or stake me.”

She closed her eyes as the agony of it ripped through her. He was giving himself to her, either or; and god, it was such a  _ massive _ responsibility. She wasn’t sure if she was ready for it. /Except… you already took him on, didn’t you, Buffy. You took him in with open arms the minute you saw him in need. You’ve taken him in, fed him, made him yours. Are you gonna take it back now?/ 

The problem being… holy crap, she wanted it, what he was offering. Wanted  _ him; _ someone who finally listened, understood her on that bizarre, unconscious level; called her on her bullshit, held her accountable, cheerled for her when it came to the job… and remembered she was also an occasionally uncertain young woman in there and cared about her heart, too. Someone who was loyal to  _ her _ , not to the group; who would have her back when she faced down the Scoobies, Giles... 

The problem was… she knew she could have it either way. He’d let her call the terms. Fighting buddy. Business partner, of sorts. Friend. Confidant.

Lover.

And therein lay the issue. She  _ knew _ now that she wanted him.  _ God _ , she wanted him, and that was the very real problem. Because could she hold back, with him offering himself up to her like this? Long term? And would it even matter, since he had no plans to go anywhere anyway, whether she accepted him or not? 

She was terrible at resisting someone who stayed. And yet… she was starting to think maybe she’d be better at it than resisting someone who threw down ultimatums; that it might be her MO to cling to the departing with protestations of love, to fight harder… maybe even to offer sex when she thought they might leave. So far, in retrospect, if someone pulled away from her emotionally or played all aloof and hard-to-get; boom. They got clingy Buffy, ready to pull out all the stops. But if they offered themselves on a platter, chased her, tried to fit into her life, like Owen did… 

And didn’t that make her an idiot of the highest order, that it might even be easier for her to push Spike away knowing he meant to stay? But it also made a twisted kind of sense; because she trusted him to do exactly what he said. No need to chase him down, drag him back, entice him... And how  _ cruel _ was that? How user-y?

Except… she did want him, badly; and he  _ knew _ it. He wasn’t dumb, and he came with the extra senses to tell. Which meant that, eventually, he would push there, just as he was doing when it came to her heart. He was impulsive demon-boy, wouldn’t be able to help it. And, honestly, she wasn’t sure she could blame him for that, because when it came to who had managed to cram the bigger truckload of issues into a shorter lifespan… /I’m your girl./ Which was pretty impressive, considering all the crap Spike had to have gone through over a hundred and whatever years, including living with Angelus and Ms. Crazypants for however many of them. 

/So, okay; time to pull up your big-girl panties and admit the truth, Buffy. If you let him stay, but you didn’t deal… You’d end up flirting. You’d tease; probably without being aware of it half the time. And you’d…/ 

She would be horrible, eventually, trying to tempt him to be the one to push her over that edge, so she wouldn’t have to be the one to break the rules. Because that push-pull… it wouldn’t be all one-sided either. Not now that she knew he wanted her too. And that meant it would eventually happen either way, pretty or not. /And God, I just don’t trust myself with it. Not after…/ 

“We could be so  _ good _ , Slayer. Buffy. You know it, don’t you? So good. I could be… your  _ partner _ . I could be such a help to you…”

He wasn’t talking business partner, oh god… He was showing her a world, a possibility she had badly wanted once before, had long since written off as a childish fantasy. She was the Slayer. She must needs stand alone. And here he stood, was telling her it didn’t have to be dirty and dark and painful and degraded and cruel… and lonely. That it could be mutually satisfying and supportive and… “You wanna be… my partner.” 

“Yeah.” He pronounced it almost belligerently, everything about his expression pugnacious, fierce… but in no way belying the vulnerability beneath. “Whaddya got to lose?”

/My friends. My life as I know it. Everything./ 

/Would it have to be… that? Would I have to trade them for you? Would I still end up alone, in the end?/

He saw her expression, and his seemed to cave in, give way to a sort of hopeless agony. “Know what I’m askin’,” he whispered. “Knew it was a long shot. But Buffy… think of what you’d gain. Know I’m not much, but…”

She closed her eyes briefly, covered his hands with her free one. “But you are,” she whispered. It wrenched at her, held her quivering between two poles. “That’s the problem.”

His eyes never left hers. “I can wait,” he whispered. “Just… think on it, pet. Just think. And if it comes to your mind that you wanna revisit it… you know I’ll be about.” And she could breathe again, reprieved, as he grinned suddenly, boyish and excited. “In the meantime, I’m feelin’ right again, and full of vim and vigor. You wanna go have a nice brawl?”

His hands were vibrating in hers, and, /Oh./ He was still full of… um… sexual energy, needed to get some of it out. Which… well. She knew all about that. “Yeah,” she told him, fondly grateful. /Breathe./ “Let’s go kick some demon ass.”

“I, um, thought you were waiting for Rupert and the rest to come here before you…” 

Buffy’s eyes jerked away from Spike, and oh crap; she had completely forgotten, for the second time in fifteen minutes, that Mom was standing just Right There. “Oh. Right. Um…” Met her eyes, feeling incredibly trepidatious about what she might see… and saw that her mother’s light-goldeny-greeny-brown eyes were all bright and shiny, her face wet. “Wow. Um, are you okay, Mom?”

Suddenly Mom was there, wrapping her up in her arms, was hugging her within an inch of her life. “I’m just really happy right now, baby,” she answered, and she sounded totally misty. “I’ve been so worried about you. You do too much alone. And now you have somebody to rely on, and that just warms my heart.” As abruptly as she had moved she put Buffy away from herself, turned to Spike. “May I give you a hug as well, Spike?”

Spike looked a little misty himself, and decidedly puppyish, almost eager as he leaned wordlessly toward Mom. And somehow gave the impression of being enveloped, despite their disparate sizes. 

/Wow, he really is just sinking into that hug, isn’t he?/ 

He wasn’t kidding with all that hanging around her mother. Like, not even a little bit. 

When he finally pulled away—which he did with unaccustomed awkwardness—he looked truly bemused. “Cheers, Joyce,” he told her softly.

“That’s British for thank you,” Buffy offered helpfully. “It also means cheers. I think. Giles uses it mostly the other way, though.”

Spike rolled his eyes exorbitantly… and jumped with a kind of a yelp when Mom actually ruffled his hair. “Is this a new look, Spike? I like it.”

Buffy fought to keep a straight face at his outraged expression. Lost the battle and had to cover her mouth to stifle the incipient giggles. Spike had probably completely forgotten that his hair was doing the curly thing, what with one thing and the other. Heck, she had gotten so used to it that she had almost stopped noticing it, except that now her hands were kind of majorly jealous of Mom’s hands, and maybe she could make some time with that hair before he got some of that damn gel back into it and slathered it all back down to his skull?

Spike must have heard her hastily-stifled amusement, because he drew himself up with dignity and shot her a deeply betrayed look that promised dire retribution soonest. “This is what happens when I don’t have hair gel. It is not something I in any way did on purpose.”

Mom frowned fitfully. Actually, okay, that was close to a pout. “That’s too bad. It’s adorable.”

“I know, right?”

Uber-death-glare, with tax and surcharges. “You are one step away, missy.”

“Uhuh.”

Nostrils flaring, he clicked his tongue at her in an exasperated way, then flipped his hands around him like they were missing something. “Wish to bloody hell I had my duster, since I’m headin’ into a fight.”

Hilarity fled, and Buffy frowned. “Oh. Right. Where the heck is that, anyway?”

He made a sour face. “Probably down in that bloody cave where I was holed up with Harmony when I was lookin’ for the Gem. If the mad chit hasn’t hocked it…”

Buffy lifted an eyebrow. /About that./ “Harmony, though?  _ Really? _ ”

He cocked one shoulder in a vague attempt at a shrug. “She passed the time. If she ever thought to sodding shut her gob, that is.”

Women’s solidarity might compel her to protest on his ex’s behalf, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. Even pre-vamp, Harmony was just so… So…

She really was the worst. /Which, again…  _ Harmony? _ Really?/

He must have been uber-desperate there for a while. Ugh. “Well, hopefully she’s gone and we can avoid running into her. Maybe we can make a side-trip to grab it on the way to the big showdown.”

Spike grunted. “I was more thinkin’ about the battle comin’ up here, pet,” he answered grimly, and twitched his arms again. Shoved a hand up to fiddle with his hair some more. 

“Oh.” /Right. That./ 

“You ready for it?” 

“Oh, yeah, sure. Fighting everyone over my right to do something they’re all sure will end in death, despair, destruction, chaos, and evil is right up there with birthdays for me.” Though, really, just the thought of the upcoming debate made her feel rebellious, underneath the tired; made her want to cling harder to Spike and prove them all wrong.

Mom looked from one to the other of them, confused. “Honey, what’s going on?”

Spike gathered up a handful of mane in an attempt to pull it back, but it was too short to ponytail it, and it just poofed out to cloud around his ears, knocking one of his cigarettes aside in the process. “‘M not the most popular choice for a beau ‘round these parts; at least when it comes to Buffy’s mates. Most of ‘em would rather see me at the pointy end of a stake than anywhere near your daughter.” And, clearly, he wanted to face them with his hair put to rights, if he couldn’t wear his duster. 

“Oh, for God’s sake, stop screwing with it. I have some mousse upstairs. It’s not gel, but it should work, at least for now.”

He threw her a grateful look. “You’re a goddess.”

“Yeah, yeah. After you do your beauty regimen, go find somewhere on the porch or something and smoke before you make me nuts.”

His grin spread wider. “Well, aren’t you a love.”

Buffy flicked her fingers at him, urging him upstairs. “Bathroom. Upstairs. Sink. Mousse.”

“Whatever you say, Slayer.” Turning on his heel, he headed for the living room.

“Buffy, why are your friends and Rupert so against your dating Spike? He seems utterly devoted to you.”

Buffy sighed and dragged her eyes away from the departing vampire to turn back to her mother. “Because of Angel.”

Mom blinked at this apparent non-sequitur. “What do they have to do with each other? I mean, aside from that they’re both vampires, I don’t really see much in the way of similarity…”

“There isn’t really. Like, at all. But tell that to them and you get a whole merry-go-round debate, I promise.” /Which, you know, you couldn’t have sworn it by me before a couple of days ago, so I guess that’s fair./

Mom frowned. “Well… that’s just… like racial profiling, isn’t it? Or, species profiling. Or… something.”

Honestly, she had a point. And, ouch. But also… It needed to be hugs time right now. “Mom,” Buffy whispered, and wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist; squeezed gently. Felt tears prickling under her lids; tears she really had no time to shed. “I really, really love you. I want you to know that.”

Mom kind of melted as she hugged back. “Oh, honey, I really, really love you too.” Then she pushed Buffy back by her shoulders and held her there, her mouth flattening to a thin, determined line. “Now, let’s demolish this argument, huh? I was hell in debate team in high school.”

Buffy’s mouth dropped open. “Let’s…”

Mom took in her shocked expression without changing hers in the slightest. “What, did you think I was going to let you two fight this battle alone, after what I just saw and heard? No way I’m going to let anyone bully my daughter out of a relationship that’s clearly good for her. Not after all the time I spent worrying sick about you, and with how depressed you were after the way that Angel business ended. Honestly, Buffy…”

Buffy bit her lip. “You’re not mad I’m dating another vampire?” /Or whatever it is we’re doing, because I guess we’re doing it./ God, it had all snuck up on her so fast. And yet, somehow, she couldn’t manage to make the scared outweigh the strange, almost floaty feeling of relief from all the weird, unlabeled uncertainty that had plagued her for the last few days-weeks-months-whatever. 

It was good to just finally have everything out on the table. 

That, or maybe she was just high from blood-loss or something.

Mom sighed. “Well, obviously I’d be happier if you weren’t, but let’s be real. With your life, who else do you meet? And if you want someone to support you with everything you have to deal with, it has to be someone who knows about all this, and preferably someone who’s strong enough to back you up. In a situation like this, I’m just overjoyed you have someone watching your back who’s knowledgeable, aware, powerful, and not your enemy. And I’d think anyone else who loves you ought to feel the same way.”

Well, Mom’s opinion was clear, and pretty straightforward. And Buffy really, really wished it was that easy. 

Though, she kind of really hoped that Spike had heard all that from his vantage upstairs.

When he descended a few minutes later, his combed curls carefully tamed back into a damp helmet of drying mousse, Buffy planted her hands firmly on her hips and shook her head. “Just because it’s gone for now doesn’t mean I don’t get to play with it later. Fair warning.”

Stopping midway down the stairs, he assessed the sincerity in her gaze. Groaned. “Bloody hell.”

“I’m just saying. Mom got to play with it, but I…”

She jumped when the doorbell rang. And her heartbeat began to speed when the anxious, familiar calls began to drift in from the far side, entreating passage. 

The cavalry had arrived.

Buffy met Spike’s solemn gaze, felt Mom coming around to flank her shoulder as she turned to the door. 

Showtime.

***

“Alright, boys. According to barkeep in there, these soldier-boys are new in town. Think they can come in and own the place, just because they got a lotta fancy hardware, buncha fun toys. But they’re just human. Humans in flak-vests with guns and croc-poles. So let’s show ‘em what it’s like to really stake a claim on a hellmouth, huh?”

A grumbling roar met Razor’s pronouncement; truculent agreement. 

“Keep your legs away, ride hard, ride fast, and do ‘em.” They were orders easy to follow for a bunch used to wrecking cars on the highway. “Let your mules take the bullets. Don’t get scragged. Get in close, take their peckers outta their hands. Every one of the fuckers’ll give if you shove his own hogleg under his jaw and yell ‘boo’ in his face.” Razor felt himself grin, slow and predatory, anticipating the victory soon to come. “Make ‘em piss themselves. Then…” He held the pause for a moment, letting it ride. 

His boys leaned in, slavering. 

“We  _ feast _ . And finally make this fucking place our  _ home _ .”

Bikes were gunned. And every Hellion in Sunnydale roared away from Willy’s, en masse, to head straight for the center of town.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
All caught up again! I hope you all liked it. I LOOOOVED writing it. 


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for the kind response to the last chapter; Y'all are so sweet, and i'm sooo glad you liked it. I've been sitting on that chapter since approx mid-October, and it's definitely my most-reread one, hehe. So excited to share.
> 
> KK: from the tsunami of yummy feels chapter to... the one where we pay for it with Scooby backlash part 1 of... (redacted).
> 
> Prepare yourselves, and hang on to those warm fuzzies while you butt through the inevitable ugh. And pray with me that Buffy does the same!
> 
> (another long one, because gotta fit in both strategery and idiot friend crap, but yanno. get it all out of the way now and get back to the fun stuff next week!)
> 
> Also, many thanks yet again to my betas, who keep catching me in early seasons continuity errors, because I seldom rewatch them, lol.

/Just keep it to the basics. ‘We have a job to do and we’re gonna do it.’ ‘No, it doesn’t matter where I’ve been.’ ‘No, it doesn’t matter what Spike’s doing here.’ ‘I don’t have time for this. We have a problem to deal with.’/ Buffy recited her rebuttals firmly to herself as she put her hand to the doorknob; chanted them fiercely as she turned the deadbolt. 

She had every intention of keeping  _ this _ battle, at least, till after the war. 

The minute they all piled in, everything went briefly out the window. 

Xander burst through first, bulling in all shoulders and concern. “God, Buffy, where the heck have you  _ been?” _ And she was enveloped in a warm, concerned embrace that made her feel both extremely loved and mildly suffocated. “Are you okay? We’ve been so  _ worried!” _

“Yeah,” she managed, patting his arm as he pulled back to hold her by the shoulders and sort of scan her up and down for damage. “I’m good. You?” He looked a little worse for wear, like Willow had, which, pile on the guilt, much? His hair was all sticking up on one side and mashed down with some weird dirt on the other, he had a streak of the stuff on his left cheek. It looked hastily wiped, like he’d tried to deal with whatever it was in a desultory fashion in probably Giles’ bathroom, but he’d missed a lot of it. The crud was still embedded in the curves of his ear, in his eyebrow, and in the crease of his nose. No visible bruises, though, thank goodness. 

Anya drew even with him, clutched his arm the way she had a tendency to do these days when she was seeking either to establish herself or find comfort when a situation went dicey. “Hello, Buffy. Have you been out killing Hellions, and that’s why we haven’t seen you?”

/You know what? Thanks for the opening, Anya./ Sometimes having a thousand-year-old demon around was seriously handy. “Actually…”

Spike finished his descent, moved to flank Buffy just behind her left shoulder. Something seemed to click inside her head in that instant, as he drew even with her there; something that just felt incredibly satisfied with feeling him there shoring up her weak side with his strong one. She found herself briefly overwhelmed with the unexpected  _ rightness _ of it.

She didn’t quite look at him, but she did acknowledge the supportive move, the silent announcement that they were a team and in this together by squaring her already-sagging shoulders and tilting her body, oh so very slightly, in his direction, in welcome. With Mom standing over there, just a foot or so away at her right and ready to fight for them, Buffy had never felt quite so… Well, buffered in her struggle to be heard in this group. “Something like that,” she answered softly.

Everybody, she noticed, was looking dubiously at her now, and eyeing Spike’s entrance to the conversation with varying levels of concern, confusion, or outright suspicion… All except for Willow, who kept her eyes on Buffy. She looked thoroughly bewildered, wore the beginnings of what might be hurt. Which made sense, Buffy supposed, since her response to the question asked had been, to Wil’s knowledge, an outright lie.  
  
“Hey, what’s the Bleached Undead doing here?” Xander demanded, sounding put out.

/And, here we go./ Buffy opened her mouth, aware without looking, just by the subtle shift in his stance, that Spike had put his virtual armor back on. She glanced over in spite of herself, watched in awe as the transformation, already in motion as he’d descended the stairs to join her, found its completion. 

Even sans duster, it was a thing to behold. He might seem smaller and less formidable without the vast leather coat, but still he could affect that air of hard, brittle snark and pull the image of fierce, deadly Master vamp about him; draw it up at will, turn himself into a creature made up of so many parts cutting wit and sarcasm, biting self-possession, nonchalance and braggadocio. And in that moment she realized what it meant, that he had taken it all off for her, his enemy. 

In his direst straits he had shed everything, cast off every ounce of his personal protection, and let her hold him at his most naked.

No way she could ever have been so brave. “Xander, Spike is…”

“Spike is here because he is an invited guest in my home, Xander,” Mom interrupted firmly. Her eyes glittered, just daring Xander to fight her.

Buffy held her breath. She had seen that set look on Mom’s face before. Xander was about to get the beat-down if he didn’t shut his mouth. 

Xander’s mouth dropped open, and he stared at Mom as if she had lost her mind. “You  _ invited _ him? But…” he sputtered. “But, do you know what he  _ is? _ I  _ know _ you know! He’s a soulless murderer! You  _ can’t _ just…”

/Ohhh, shit. You so did not just tell my mom…/

Mom’s eyes turned to frozen-over ponds. “Xander Harris, I know you’re not going to tell me who I can and cannot have in my own home.”

Xander subsided immediately, having turned kind of a pale puce.

Giles, of course, promptly took up the slack. “While Xander of course went about it in very much the wrong way, his concern is genuine and understandable. The fact of the matter remains, Joyce, that Spike is in fact a vicious killer. You might do well to…”

“Since you are all using my home as a staging ground for your battle,” Mom cut him off flatly, “I think maybe you should stop telling me who gets to be in here while you plan your strategy, and focus on how to get these invaders out of our town.” She stepped back, gesturing toward the living room. “I suggest you all take seats. I’ll go find us some refreshments. Spike, Buffy, will you help me carry?”

Her implication was clear. She considered Spike to be among the people hosting the party. Everyone else was a guest, here on suffrage, and thus they had better behave appropriately, as guests ought. 

Spike had just been elevated above them, to a class somewhere closer to family.

The Scoobies were probably all wondering what the hell had just happened. Buffy left them to fumble their way over to find seats as she trailed her mother back into the kitchen, marveling as she did at the way the elder Summers woman could use tact, decorum, and an insistence on manners to cut irritating people to shreds. /I wanna be you someday, Mom. As if I’ll ever have, like, one-tenth of your patience./ She had always been more like her father in that way, sadly. But… 

Behind her, Spike was grinning like a gargoyle as they entered the kitchen. Ahead of them, Mom was slamming cups down willy-nilly on the counter, frowning. “I’m sorry,” she muttered as they entered, and paused briefly before turning to yank open the fridge in an agitated manner. Stood in front of it, glaring at the insides like they were personally offensive, then slammed it shut again. “It’s just, I cannot abide rudeness.” 

She would stand with them for that reason, but here, outside the warm haze of Spike’s shocking confession and her own reaction to it, Buffy couldn’t quite wrap her brain around how easily Mom had accepted everything. Not after the way things had gone with her last vampire-dating sitch. It just didn’t make sense. 

Not that Buffy felt she should complain. God knew she was grateful, but it all seemed too simple somehow. And now, with everyone else here ready to attack them, she needed to be sure of her ground. Because before…

It burst out of her before she could censor herself. “Why doesn’t it bother you more, Mom? Why are you so okay with this? You were so not happy about me and Angel…”

Spike tensed beside her. She could practically _ feel _ his frustration. He wanted to hiss at her right now not to rock the boat. 

She ignored him. She desperately needed to know before she went back out there. 

Mom swung around, pressed the heels of her hands to the edge of the counter. Looked briefly down at her feet. “Frankly, Buffy… I never liked Angel.” Her eyes lifted to meet theirs, and she shrugged a little but did not back down. “It may hurt you to hear it, but there it is.”

/Well, okay, wow./

“Doesn’t hurt  _ me,” _ Spike put in jauntily.

Buffy elbowed him sharply in the belly. He huffed, but his round good humor was clearly still intact. Even the huff sounded grinny. 

Mom's eyes rose to meet hers, regretful but firm. “I’m sorry, baby. I know you loved him, but it wasn’t a forever love. I didn’t like how he treated you, how he talked to you… how you made yourself smaller around him. I just didn’t much like the relationship. And you were a lot younger…”

Buffy found herself gaping. Her relationship with Angel had felt so secure to her. Maybe a little stifling at times, but never… like Mom was describing it. “It was… only a year or two ago…”

“Younger in ways that don’t have to do with years.” A brief pause. “I  _ like  _ Spike,” Mom insisted firmly then, her eyes sliding over to bathe the current vampire in a brief, commending warmth. Buffy felt Spike inflate behind her as Mom went on. “I always have. He doesn’t seem likely to control any woman he’s with, like Angel did…”

“Angel didn’t…”

“Not bloody likely. As if anyone could control a woman. Best thing to do is hop on for the ride and be grateful you get to be in her orbit.”

Mom’s voice bloomed in approval. “See? There’s the difference. And Buffy? Nudging someone around out of love is still controlling them.” Her tones turned firm, then softened. “From what I’ve seen, Spike gives you space. He seems encouraging. Generous.” Her lips twitched. “And, this may sound idiotic when talking about a vampire, but he seems… younger, somehow…”

Feeling very knocked off kilter, Buffy spoke through numb lips. “Well, he is, a little…”

“I think he’s better for you. And I’ve seen a little more since then about what you go through. And you’re not under my roof in high school anymore. So…” She pushed away from the counter. “Of course, you’re only nineteen, if going on thirty, so I do have my qualms…”

“Mom…”

One hand rose to forestall her. “But I’ve come to realize that I’d have them about any relationship, with anybody who wasn’t exactly your age. And I recognize now that someone your own age would be unlikely to be able to understand, accept, or support you with anything you have to deal with. So I suppose my concerns in that regard have to exist on a continuum.” Her eyes glided back over Buffy’s shoulder to meet Spike’s, and she showed a sparkling smile that somehow managed to look terrifying. “But it goes without saying that if you ever hurt her, Spike, I can still find a fire axe.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way, Joyce.” Standing at Buffy’s left shoulder, Spike sounded reverent.

Agitated voices drifted in from the living room. “...You see him, just standing there like he owns the place?”

“Believe me, Xander, I saw. Never you worry. We’ll get to the bottom…”

Mom whirled away from the counter, all glares once more. “Are they always this awful to you?”

The warm, quiet mood evaporated into grim reality. “Tend to be, yeah.”

“Well, that’s just unacceptable.”   


Spike shifted like mercury, all grinning merriment once more. “Joyce, you’re a pearl among the swine of this good green earth. No wonder Buffy’s already such a hell of a woman.”

Mom smiled warmly at this and patted his cheek. “Aren’t you a smoothie.” She headed back to the fridge with a businesslike air, but Buffy could see that she was pleased. “Buffy, what do you think? You should know what your friends drink. Juice, or…”

Striving to get back onto even ground, Buffy caught her guy’s hand, clung for a moment. “Suck-up,” she whispered in a shaky but credibly teasing undertone. Felt him squeeze back, and raised her voice enough to be heard by her mother. “Juice is fine. Giles will deal.”

“Only the truth,” Spike murmured back under his breath. “Turnin’ into a hell of a woman, you. Knew you would, though, watchin’ you.”

Mom set two kinds of juice on the counter and headed back to the cupboard to grab a couple more cups. Buffy shook her head and avoided looking at her suave vamp as she opened the orange juice and started pouring for Willow. The commonplace task would steady her nerves. “You weren’t watching me to see what kind of woman I was going to turn into. You were studying my moves.” 

Spike seized the grape-apple blend and poured it blindly into one of the other mugs. “Observation stands.”

“Not if you got your way back then. I wouldn’t have turned into anything much, Mr. Impatient.”

Spike rolled his eyes and slopped some juice into another glass. Lifted it and a brow, hinting. She picked up one of hers, waited to hear it. 

“Then, here’s to our truce, yeah?”

Buffy shook her head in exasperation. “Sure, fine. Cheers.”

He clicked his mug to hers, took a ceremonial sip. She sipped hers as well and made a face in his general direction. “Which, by the way, you never get to call me a terrible liar again.” And she turned back to her glass-filling task.

“Beg pardon, luv?”

“I played  _ triangle?” _ she demanded, incredulous. “What, I’m not coordinated enough for some other instrument? I just have to stand there and look pretty while you wail out front?” And okay, was it petty that that reflexive answer still rankled a little?

“Oi! I fixed it after!”

“‘Hell on the old skins’?” she parroted mockingly.

“Listen, you. That was a damn good save; and a sight more complimentary than admittin’ you’d probably put a hole in a drum if you really got going…”

“Oh, give me some credit.” Buffy considered it, tilted her head slightly. “I think I’d be pretty good at playing the drums,” she pronounced finally, somewhere between firm and coquettish.

“Oh, luv, you ever want to give it a try, I’d love to see it. In fact, I’ll even spring for…”

“Wait, wait… you two were never in a band together?” Mom demanded, breaking in.

/Um… you actually  _ bought _ that?/ “Uh… Mom, Slayer and a vampire?”

“Well,” Mom answered, frowning, “who says that means you didn’t… I mean, maybe before you knew what he was, or something?” She sized up Spike again, a thoughtful expression on her face. “You certainly look like rock-god material…”

Spike puffed up again. Buffy slapped him on the chest with the back of her hand, and he smirked cheerily in reply. 

“…Kind of like a short-haired Robert Plant…”

“Joyce, you flatter me!”

“Who’s Robert Plant?”

Spike stared from her to Mom and back again, aghast. “You’re neglecting your daughter’s education.”

“Apparently. Buffy, Robert Plant was the lead singer of Led Zeppelin. British. Thin and sexy and slick, tight pants and leather and curly blond hair…”

Buffy felt her mouth drop open. “Please tell me you’re not flirting with my boyfriend, Mom. And also, Spike looks like a Billy Idol wannabe, not…”

“Oi! That plonker stole  _ my _ look, not the other way about! Walked straight into me in Kings Road at the beginning of the scene, walked out, and a few years later he’s up on stage at CBGBs, struttin’ my stuff like a pillock…”

_ “Really,” _ Mom asked, and leaned forward to plunk her elbows down on the counter and her chin in her hands, looking fascinated. “God, we really need to talk sometime about some of the people you’ve met…”

“Oh my God…”

“Stole my lines too, some of ‘em.”

“Your lines?”

“Yeah; you know. Was whisperin’ sweet nothings to Dru one time, he heard ‘em, put ‘em in his bloody songs. Even used the same soddin’ key…”

“So you  _ do _ sing!”

Buffy couldn’t even. “No, you don’t!” she exclaimed. “That was just a cover story, you  _ so _ don’t!”

Spike turned away from Mom to grin down at her. “‘S all you know, pet. Happen to have a highly trained singin’ voice, actually, for all I’ve barely used it since my school days.” And then a strange expression crossed his face and he clammed up.

/Okay, you know what?/ “I think I’m going to need to hear evidence of this.”

Spike had turned abruptly stoic. “Might be able to sing. Doesn’t mean I’m about to perform on command, like a soddin’ show-pony.”

“Oh, no,” Buffy insisted, and grabbed his shirt collar. Turned him hard to face her, double-fisted him. “You don’t get to say something like that and then just wiggle out of it. We’ll find a private venue sometime, but you’re so gonna have to give me a demonstration.”

He stared down at her for a moment, clearly nonplussed, then cast his eyes toward the ceiling and looked put-upon. “Had to open my great sodding gob, didn’t I?”

“Can’t take it back now.” 

“Bloody hell. Well, I s’pose…”

“Hey; the gang sent me in to see what the holdup… Oh man, what did he do now?” Xander’s weary snark broke up the moment as he stalked into the kitchen, rolling his eyes. “Like I care. I’m sure it was something awful. Whatever it was, can I watch you deck him? Please?”

Buffy found herself briefly confused until she realized how the scene must look from a newcomer’s perspective. Her, holding Spike by the collar, fists under his chin and staring up at him with stern intent, Spike looking down at her and feigning weary resignation. It seemed that from the outside it wasn’t so easy to read the playfulness underneath the gestures. Which was probably of the good right now, considering that Buffy was really just not in the mood to get into the debate at the moment; especially not with Xander. 

Spike’s eyes on hers telegraphed a sardonic amusement to match her own. Sighing heavily, she released his tee and gave him a tiny shove. “Let’s get these drinks in there, huh?”

“Yeah. Sure.” He turned to fill his hands with a mug and a glass.

Smiling slightly, Mom did the same, eyes warm on them and apparently approving. Shaking her head, Buffy filled her own hands. “Xander, can you grab one? I have mine and Spike’s…”

“I’ll grab my own. No way I’m letting  _ him _ carry mine. And Anya’s taking one from someone else, too. And I don’t want Wil to take one from him either. And…”

“I’d think, since it’s my house and my drinks, I might get something of a say,” Mom broke in smoothly, and swept past Xander to head past the foot of the stairs, leaving Xander’s petty complaints in the dust.

Holding her breath, Buffy avoided his eye and followed, uncertain how to feel. Had he always bitched this much? And if he had, why hadn’t it bothered her more before?

/Probably because I shared his opinions on a lot of things./ Which, okay; really bothered her now, in retrospect. 

“Alright,” Buffy opened as they reentered the living room. She figured best to call the meeting to order right off the bat, keep the upper hand while Mom and Spike were still handing out the appropriate juices to the appropriate hands. “Sorry about the wait. Orange juice for Wil, Spike, the grape thing for Giles…”

“Figured. Here you are, then, Red. Watcher…”

Willow, seated on one end of the couch, took her glass with a strangely bemused expression. Giles, in the armchair closest to the front door, took his with a snort that said he found the idea of being served a mug of juice by William the Bloody all kinds of ironic. Not that Buffy didn’t recognize the irony herself, but she kind of thought Spike would do a lot more and crazier to ingratiate himself to her mother, so there was that. 

As if to wordlessly agree with her, Spike ignored Giles’ derision to move off to one side, but did not take a seat anywhere. /He’s waiting for his cue/ Buffy realized abruptly, and for lack of anything better to do, handed him his cup. 

He cradled it, clearly uninterested in the contents but glad of something to do with his hands, as Xander passed Wil to fling himself down on the couch between her and Anya, handing his girlfriend-ish the drink he held and glaring around him with suspicious eyes. Obviously he smelled something he didn’t like in the air, what with the whole free-range Spike. That, or he was just upset that he was being foiled in treating the vampire the way he preferred to, and maybe mad that Buffy, who usually sided with him, at least nominally, in these matters, was apparently not going to do so. “So, what’s the deal, here, Buff?” he demanded, and leaned forward tensely over his knees.

Lips taut, Mom handed him one glass, though it was clear she was finding him offensive enough right now that she would rather have left him empty-handed. Her hostess training wouldn’t permit that, though, so instead she merely kept her lips tightly closed and moved to take a seat on the armchair at the far end of the couch opposite Giles. She flicked her eyes to Buffy then, yielding the floor. 

Once she had taken her seat, Spike caught Buffy’s eye, gave the tiniest nod, and moved slowly to one side to pull out one of the short little embroidered chairs grouped around the game-table, whereupon he folded himself into a sitting position there, just to one side of her but within arm’s reach, and waited, eyes never leaving the side of her face. 

/Okay, then./ “So, what we’ve figured is, there’re probably about twenty to thirty of these guys, total, here in town. That’s the usual size of a chapter, right, Spike?”

“Thereabouts, yeah,” he answered in measured tones. 

“Which means we need to find some way to lure them into some sort of central location where they aren’t all spread out all over wreaking havoc, then figure out a way to ambush them there. The problem being that they’re also tough as nails and hard to kill…”

_ “Excuse _ me!” Xander interrupted, raising his hand and lowering his head as if to batter his way into the discussion headfirst. “Why exactly are we taking  _ Spike’s _ word for it, how many there are? Are they pals or something? In which case, how can we trust  _ him _ , of all undead jerks, not to be lying about ‘em? For all we know he’s in cahoots with ‘em! I mean…” And he let out a harsh, disbelieving laugh. “I’m not even sure why he’s  _ in _ this meeting.”

Buffy felt a surge of irritation at the interruption. They didn’t have  _ time _ for this! “We're going to trust Spike’s opinion because he knows what he's talking about, and because he has the demon knowhow. And I can vouch for that…”

“Oh,  _ please _ . And we’re so sure he’s not working his own angle here…”

Buffy had to bite back the sharp retort that wanted to leap from her lips. After all, she would have thought all these same things a few days ago. Heck, a few days ago they might not necessarily have been entirely out of the realm of possibility, though not with these particular demons of course. 

Restraining her temper with an effort, Buffy turned to Xander’s equally-knowledgeable ex-demon girlfriend. "Anya, what do you know about the Hellions?" she asked quietly. If they were lucky, the former vengeance-demon would know something, and her testimony would back Spike. Xander wouldn’t like it, of course, but he wouldn’t question his (girlfriend? Fuckbuddy?) the way he automatically did every vampire ever. For some reason it was okay for a  _ former _ demon to get a bye in Xander’s mind, a thousand years of misdeeds aside, and none of them regretted any more than Spike’s had been. Fine for him to accept her willingness to turn around and try to assimilate into regular human society, while it was impossible for him to even remotely question Spike’s position as irrefutable and immutable evil with no chance of reformation. 

/Which… I was willing to give that benefit of the doubt to Anya too, and Anya started out human, got demoned up, did all those things… and then unwillingly came back to join us because she had no choice, just like Spike, is sticking with it because of Xander. Why is that different? She doesn’t have the powers anymore, but she regrets not one moment of her demon years, even celebrates the godawful things she did. What makes any of us think she might not just go vigilante any second if she’s ticked off enough by some jerk thing some guy does sometime? She doesn’t need her powers any more than Spike needs to bite to kill. She can do it just the same way any standard human serial killer can… except she’s had way more practice and has way better ideas to choose from. She’d just have to get a little more inventive, and be okay with losing Xan./

God, what a thought. 

One guess, of course, what the difference was for Xander. A, Anya was all human—and hence, souled—right now. B, she was his girlfriend (or whatever they were doing). Put those together and she was forgiven and untouchable. Which, well, A had been enough for Buffy, before. But now…

/Apparently B is enough for me when it comes to Spike, just like C, the not-human but with-soul option, was enough for me with Angel. Will Xander be able to see that if he can’t buy into just B being enough, he’s got a serious double-standard going?/

Probably highly unlikely, considering that C, coupled with tons of remorse, hadn’t done much for his attitude toward Angel, before.

The thought struck Buffy hard, right between the eyes. /Did Anya have a soul during her demon period?/

“I’ve run into them a few times over the last hundred or so years,” Anya was saying. She sounded touched and actually kind of enthused to be asked. “They do run in packs. I’m not sure the current chapter size, but the last time I ran afoul of them, in St. Louis about eighty years ago… Which was a really fantastic party, by the way. Prohibition. Hallie and I—she was my best friend, great gal—we were in town to curse an abusive family and this biker, respectively… Anyway, when I cursed the Hellion—and it was a really great curse, you should have seen it. The flesh of his man-parts sizzled every time he thought of sex, and he had to…”

“Ahn!” Xander’s eyes jerked over toward where Mom sat, though he didn’t quite meet her eyes. “Please, stop!”

Buffy spared a brief thought for how her mother was taking the conversation, but only a brief one. She was too busy focusing on Spike as Anya sighed. “You never let me get to the good part, Xander. I know you’re sensitive about these sorts of stories, but you really have no idea what he did to deserve it. And I promise you that he did.” She sounded disgruntled. 

Buffy didn’t have to check in with her vampire to agree. She truly believed that, at least based on current behavior, this long-gone Hellion had probably deserved whatever the vengeance demon had done to him. For approximately the first time since she had been exposed to these endlessly godawful war-stories, she found herself ferally glad of the recounting. “I don’t doubt it,” she heard herself mutter.

Leaning forward with deep interest, Spike crossed a forearm over his knee. “So, was it, like, a sizzling-in-acid sort of sensation, or more of a fire-type-deal?” He seemed inordinately fascinated; not that Buffy blamed him, and his eyes were flaring with morbid interest. 

“Sort of both. It was a really complicated sensation to inflict, but I was really rather proud of it…”

“Lifelong?”

“Oh, of course. No point to it if it just wore off after a couple of days, right?”

Spike leaned back abruptly, looking deeply satisfied. “That’s art, that is.” He gave a little nod of approval. “Fine bloody art.”

“Why, thank you, Spike! I always did say you had some good taste…”

“Oh, great; now the gross undead guy is encouraging Anya to go back to the old ways. I told you he was a bad influence.” Throwing Spike a disgusted look, Xander turned to his ex-demon girlfriend. “I told you, Ahn-honey, discussing what you used to do to the bad men is not polite public conversation.”

Anya’s glow over the warm acceptance of her talents froze. “You may not appreciate my work, Xander, but it was necessary, and it was a part of my life for a very long time. Insulting it in such condescending fashion might not be the best way to my heart.”

“So, you used to… ah… inflict harm on men,” Mom interrupted, piecing it together, “to exact revenge on them when they…”

“Wronged women, yes,” Anya finished proudly.

“Well,” Mom answered, leaning back in her seat. “That doesn’t sound like too bad a line of work, does it?”

Anya beamed. “Buffy, you didn’t tell me your mother was such a discerning woman of taste.”

Xander groaned.

This whole conversation was getting off-topic. “How, um, many Hellions were in the chapter you… you know, encountered in St. Louis?” Buffy nudged hopefully.

“Oh! Sorry, I forgot that was even important. About twenty-five, though the one I did vengeance on left shortly afterward to seek a cure. Not that he would ever find one. The only one who can ever undo a vengeance demon’s curse is the same vengeance demon. He was doomed to spend the rest of his sorry existence with a flaming hot…”

“Anya! I’m  _ begging _ you!”

“So, about what Spike said is the standard chapter-size,” Buffy broke in blandly. “Thank you, Anya.”

“Anytime, Buffy,” the ex-demon chirped back happily, and she sounded like she meant it. Buffy spared a brief moment to wonder just exactly how much she had just smoothed her way into a better relationship with Xander’s weird girlfriend via that little discussion; one she might never have handled so well without the new understanding Spike had offered her during their two nights alone in the motel. She kind of liked the idea of having access to Anya’s unique perspective more often… and honestly, the woman might be blunt, but she was a font of information. She shouldn’t be shut down so often just because her perspective was a little wacky.

Wacky, Buffy had learned very recently, could also pan out to be extremely important. Besides; that other perspective had seriously helped her case.

Not that you could swear it by everyone. “That doesn’t mean anything,” Xander insisted belligerently. “What some other troop of demon-bikers were doing in another state in the thirties or whatever…”

“Twenties,” Willow corrected automatically. When Xander’s eyes jerked over to glare at her, blazing, she shrugged and spread her hands. “What? Right is right.”

“Whatever,” Xander insisted. “It doesn’t have anything to do with what’s happening here in Sunnydale now…”

Giles’ glasses had come off, and he was pinching the bridge of his nose. “Do be quiet, Xander,” he murmured. “You’re giving me an headache.”

Xander rounded on Giles, gaping. “What, are you saying you buy what this peroxided…”

Giles cut him off with a weary wave of his hand. “Anya has confirmed that the intelligence that Spike has provided is accurate, in a general sense, and Buffy has ratified it. No doubt she has seen things in the past day and a half which have confirmed this information, or she would not have placed this much trust in a vampire’s offering.” He proceeded to pull off his glasses, shook his head slightly before he replaced them. “I think we should move forward from here to the more useful business of working out our strategy, and away from a point of debate which will no doubt prove to be a frittery waste of time.” 

Xander sputtered for a moment, then swung back to Buffy and narrowed his eyes. And went back on the offensive. “You never said what the heck it was you were doing for the last couple of nights, Buffy, that made it so impossible for you to even get in  _ touch _ with us! Wil says you never came back to sleep at the dorm.  _ You _ say you were tussling with these biker-demons, but you don’t have a mark on you, and now here you are with  _ Spike _ , acting totally weird and  _ trusting his word _ …” There was a wealth of suspicion in his every syllable, though not yet any innuendo, because no doubt he could not allow himself to believe it enough to make the accusation. Still, Buffy found herself quailing, opened her mouth to reply, found no prepared words ready to exit the launchpad of her throat. She felt cornered, at sea, battered, ready to sink beneath the gasping waves…

“We had a run-in with the bastards,” Spike chipped in blandly. It was the first time he’d spoken up since they had all sat down. “Right outside Watcher’s flat, actually. Think they were spyin’ there, tryin’ to suss out the Slayer’s habits. Came at us while we were out front arguin’ over whether I shoulda been out wanderin’ about so far from the door. Buffy fought with ‘em, since clearly I wasn’t meant to be any use. She chased ‘em off, but they nabbed me. Hauled me off to find out what I knew, since I’d been hangin’ about with you lot. Thought I might have some information, yeah?”

Buffy stared at him, mouth hanging open. Was he going to tell them…

“Oh, I see. Spilled your guts to them about Buffy being in college and how they could just come in and…”

Spike rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Course not, you nit. No need. That’s common knowledge ‘round here. Every demon in town knows the Slayer only patrols every other night now, alternates with the campus of late. But of course she thought I might have somethin’ to tell ‘em, so she came after. Caught ‘em workin’ me over at the motel. Fought ‘em…”

/Working you over./ Buffy felt nauseous, aware of the double entendre of the words. Obviously he was counting on their all taking them for the more common meaning, but now Buffy wondered just how she might have reacted if things had gone that way instead; if she had found Spike tied to a chair and being beaten within an inch of his life by those bastards, instead of…

She definitely wouldn’t have given him the same benefit of the doubt. Would have assumed, like Xander, that he would have spoken up. Not that it would have made any sense, since there would be no reason to continue to beat on someone who had given the information their interrogators sought. 

Willow, Buffy noticed distantly, was watching them both with an incredibly strange look on her face. She hadn’t spoken much at all since the Scoobies had piled into the house, had been visibly upset from the start, when Buffy’s brief, breezy blowing-off of a not-explanation had failed to jibe with her own experience. Now she seemed to be analyzing this more elaborate one for flaws, her eyes flickering from Spike’s face to Buffy’s and back again. At which point her eyes narrowed abruptly, as if smelling a rat. 

In that same exact instant, Buffy realized the discrepancy. /Oh God. Spike didn’t have a single mark on his face when Wil first showed up at the motel. And that was before the blood./ 

“Once they were done for,” Spike was finishing up succinctly, “Buffy got me to talk, found out who they were and what they were maybe up to, and we stayed there for a bit while we tried to figure out a plan...”

“You  _ stayed _ there?” Xander demanded, incredulous.

“Yeah,” Buffy heard herself answer, as if from some great distance. “He was pretty hurt, and I needed him to have my back. He was the only one who knew about these Hellion guys, and right then, at the end, we found out…” They weren’t going to like this, but… “The chip doesn’t let Spike hit humans, obviously, but he can fight other demons. We found that out when he lost it and killed the one… One of ‘em. So I also wanted to be sure…”

Xander shot to his feet. “Hold up. Hold on just one minute. Are you saying that the chip in his head…”

Buffy cut him off before he could go nuts. “Lets Spike fight other demons.”

Xander hit fever pitch in an instant. “How do you know it’s just demons? How do you know…”

“Because we tested it. Sit  _ down _ , Xander.” Seriously, Buffy was kind of done with being interrupted.

Staring at her in shock, Xander subsided back to the couch.

“Anyway, like I said, he had the 411 about these guys, ‘cause he’d run into them before somewhere in, like, what?” She shot a quick look over her right shoulder toward Spike. “Ninety-seven?”

“Yeah, ‘long about July.”

“And he knew how to fight ‘em. I had to get him healthy again so we could be on the lookout in case…”

An exceptionally disappointed voice broke through her explanation. “Am I correct in inferring from this highly unpleasant digression, Buffy, that you were aware these… creatures were coming?”

Buffy exhaled heavily and turned to her Watcher, preparing for round two. “Of  _ course _ not, Giles. If I  _ knew _ they were on their way I would have been out there ready for them, and I would’ve told you guys right away. At first we thought it was just those two, and they were dead. There was always a chance they told their buddies they were in town, but since this is a hellmouth with a Slayer in residence, which apparently messes up every bad demon’s good time…”

Spike snorted sarcastically.

“…It seemed doubtful that they’d hit us.” 

Anya was the one to break the confounded silence, and she did so with a nod of approval. “I think it’s quite commendable of you, Buffy, that you chose to remain behind to assist a fellow fighter in regaining strength after finding that, at least in the current instance, you’re on the same side. I find it heartening that you’re suddenly so willing to put aside your differences with a demon you’ve previously despised if you need to work together. It shows an open-mindedness I wasn’t aware you possessed. I think that means good things for me, at least.”

Buffy had to give it to Anya; she always looked out for number one. “I appreciate that, Anya.” /I think./

Out of the corner of her eye, Buffy thought she caught a wry look on her vampire’s face, though the dancing in his eyes was carefully hidden behind a stony expression. 

“So, what. You decided to just… hang  _ out _ with the evil undead till he got healthy?  _ Why, _ Buffy? Why should you  _ care? _ What’s going…”

“We fought side-by-side,” Buffy interrupted Xander grimly. “And it’s not even the first time.”

Xander gaped at her, shocked into silence. 

“She is correct. They have, in fact, had a truce in the past, when the situation called for it.” Giles sat up and replaced his glasses, which had apparently come off again sometime in the interim when Buffy was not looking. “I believe we really ought to move on. Buffy, you were about to speak to strategy, I understand?”

Buffy was deeply grateful in that instant that she’d told Giles about the whole Spike-truce-Acathla thing right before she’d marched off to vanish with their ambivalent vampire charge like a day or whatever later, because if she had not, she really doubted he would be buying into any of this right now. And dammit, she needed at least one Scooby on her side! Well, except for Anya, who was kind of not really a full-fledged Scooby yet so much as dating (or at least, having unlabeled sex with?) one. 

Wil was still basically not weighing in at all. She just went on staring at Buffy with that strange look on her face; confusion predominant, and a new, underlying sort of assessment that was really unnerving. Which was understandable considering that even if the coverage she was hearing matched up in a general sense with what she had seen at the motel and it probably didn’t seem like Buffy was lying, per se, it definitely would seem from Willow’s perspective that there was something off about the story. Probably she was still working on that damning lack of visible bruising on the vampire she had encountered when she’d first arrived to answer Buffy’s call for help, because if Willow Rosenberg was good at anything, it was attention to detail. She would worry at something like this forever till she figured it out. A puzzle. Something missing. /There is. I’m leaving something out. The thing is, Wil, it’s not important, and I can’t tell you. But it doesn’t change what happened./

The problem being, if Wil was questioning the veracity of their story, it meant that she would also be questioning her part in it; wondering what Buffy had made her lie for, and to their friends about, and just what exactly had she gotten herself into in the name of friendship. /And probably she’s remembering Angel right now. Me hiding Angel in the mansion, not telling anyone he was back. Probably she’s feeling uber-betrayed, and scared, and…/

The worst part was, Buffy couldn’t help feeling like Wil wasn’t all that wrong to feel that way. She had kind of really presumed on their friendship maybe a little too much in this circumstance, but… /I didn’t have anywhere else to turn, don’t you see? I’m sorry, Wil, but…/

But normally Willow would be the first person in the group to take her part, and here she sat, silent.

It was a terrible thought to know that her friendship with her bestie was not only shaky right now, but might just be hanging on by a thread.

/But I’ll have to deal with it after the battle. I can’t… cope with this right now./ “Okay. So, the strategy as far as I can see it is, we need to box these guys up somewhere if we can. Lure them all into one place and then take ‘em all out at once. Which leaves us with three problems.” Raising a hand, Buffy began to tick them off on her fingers. “One, how do we do the luring. Two, where do we lure ‘em to. Three, what do we use to take ‘em out.” Lowering her fingers, she spread both hands. “I’m still thinking about one and three, but for two, I was thinking Willy’s. They’re supposed to be there anyway, or at least to be going in and out of there a lot. If we can get ‘em all in there somehow, we can maybe box them in and then…”

Spike leaned forward slightly. That was all she needed to turn to him. “Problem?”

He twitched one shoulder, a minor suggestion of a frown touching just the corner of his mouth. “Clem did say as how maybe Willy’s still in there, yeah? Some sort of sodding hostage or summat. Would be just like them to do it, too, along with who knows how many others. Box them in there, you’re also boxin’ in whoever else they have trapped inside. Then, say we firebomb the rats’ nest. Willy and the other poor sods go up too.” The slight twist to his lips then twitched upward in sardonic amusement. “That, an’ you’ll have Clem and the other lots cryin’ about no place to play poker next week, an’ wantin’ to put it on your head…”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “That’s the least of my worries.” With a sigh, she scrubbed between her eyes with her wrist. “Not that I think Willy deserves to lose his business just because he’s a snitchy punk. He didn’t ask for these guys to come in and take over his place, and we don’t need any more casualties.”

“No more  _ human _ casualties, anyway,” Xander pointed out with grim aggro. “I don’t really care if there are a bunch of demons in there too. For all we know if they’re stuck in there with those guys when they might even be on their side.”

Spike went rigid. His hands trembled, just a little, and, dammit, his fingers were digging, hard, into the dark denim covering his thighs. 

Buffy bit her lip.  _ “No _ innocent casualties, Xander. Anyone who’s been attacked by the Hellions is a victim. End of discussion.”

_ “Innocent?” _ Xander demanded, sounding horrified at her unexpected classification. “What demon is  _ ever _ …”

/Oh, so every single demon automatically deserves a death-sentence just for existing?/ Buffy hadn’t realized Xander felt that way about it. She herself was suspicious of most demons, but she could live and let live unless they got up to something. This was seriously extreme. “Wow, Xander. Just wow.” She was starting to get tired of trying to keep Xander shut down and calling the meeting to order. Did he have to get offended about every second thing that came out of her mouth?

_ “What?” _ Xander demanded, curt and bellicose. “Demons are bad. We kill demons. I don’t see how any one demon is any different than these jerks wrecking the city right now.” 

Anya had pulled away from her boyfriend, was leaning back to stare at him in shock. “So, if I started taking up vengeance again, you’d want Buffy to kill me, or you’d kill me yourself. Is that what you’re saying?”

Xander stared back, mouth hanging open. Shut it. Opened it again, kind of gabbling soundlessly. 

Anya stood to walk away from him, around the arm of the couch. 

/Oh, damn./ 

Well, considering how harsh Xan’s views were, Buffy was honestly kind of impressed that they’d lasted this long as it was, but right now she felt super bad for the girl.

“Willy’s not totally human either,” Spike pointed out into the tense silence. “He’s got some demon in him. Like a lot of humans in this town,” he tacked on, making it sound oddly pointed. “Something about a hellmouth; you get a lot of interbreeding way back down the line. And for the ones as don’t have that, there’s always the odd genetic effects to living for generations on a dimensional portal…”

/Wait. Is he saying that people like Wil and Xan, whose families are from around here for a long time, might have some demon in them? Or that that might explain why Wil’s so good at magicks, or…/ Well, it wasn’t like Willy was visibly demonic in ancestry, but Spike would be able to smell it, and if that was a common thing around here… /It sure would explain some things. Like Xander’s bizarre attraction to demons, and theirs to him./ But that was neither here nor there right now. “It doesn't matter how much Willy is or isn’t human,” she informed them all firmly. “He is an innocent bystander in all of this. New plan.”

“Ahn…” Xander was inclined toward his girlfriend, hand out, pleading. 

“I’m not speaking to you right now, Xander Harris. I trusted you. Now I’m not entirely sure that I can, and that hurts.” 

“Ahn, I…”

“I said no! Not now!”

Xander whirled away, glared at Spike with venom in his eyes. “This is all  _ your _ fault! Buffy’s been acting weird ever since that stupid spell, and now…”

“In that case, might say this is all Red’s fault,” Spike interrupted flatly.

Willow flinched and paled, looking stricken.

/Oh, great. Thanks, Spike. That helped bunches./ God, this was all going to hell. “Xander, I’m sorry you and Anya are having a bad moment, but right now we have more important things to…”

_ “No!” _ Xander surged to his feet, face suffused and mottled with rage. “I want him  _ out _ of here! All he does is cause trouble, and death, and mayhem, and destruction…”

Spike looked up from his casual seated position, apparently unflustered. “Gettin’ me confused with Angelus, I think, Harris,” he answered calmly. He even seemed mildly amused. 

“You’re all the same! Now get  _ out _ of…”

Mom had had enough. “Xander Harris! I know I shouldn’t have to remind you whose house this is; who has eviction privileges, and who doesn’t.”

/Seriously. Do you actually think you can step over Mom and throw her guests out?/ Xander was about to get  _ schooled _ . It was going to be ugly. Frankly, Buffy was a little afraid for him.

“I don’t know how it is in your parents’ home, but in my house you’re a  _ guest _ , which means you need to be  _ polite _ . If you cannot manage to be civil to Spike under my roof, you can walk out that door, do you  _ understand _ me?”

Buffy let out a breath, unsure when she had started holding it. God; Mom’s quietly fierce defense of Spike, and by it, of her relationship with him, was nothing short of legendary right now.

Xander was staring at Mom, all his explosive rage subsiding to a kind of horrified amazement. “Walk out… Into  _ that? _ But… have you seen what’s out there? Those demon…”

“I’ve seen. But I cannot abide rudeness, and I will  _ not _ tolerate it in my home.”

“But… he’s rude too! And he’s a  _ demon! _ If we can’t get along and anyone should be thrown out, it should be  _ him! _ He’s the one who can go out and get along with his pals out there, not me!”

Mom did that thing where she turned hard as nails without even shifting position. Her voice turned crazy frosty, her eyes sharp and piercing. Buffy would so not switch places with Xander right now; not if someone  _ paid _ her. “Spike is being the soul of civility, despite the way you’ve been treating him...”

“He’s just doing that to suck up to you and Buffy…”

“Don’t interrupt me in my home, Xander!”

/Eee!/

“He’s served you drinks, which I’m sure he would prefer not to do, kept his mouth shut when you’ve insulted him over and over—along with your own girlfriend, I might add—and now you think he should be responsible for  _ your _ behavior toward him just because he’s a demon?” 

This question seemed to completely flummox Xander. “Well, I mean… he  _ deserves _ it, doesn’t he?”

Didn’t Xander see that he was just digging himself in deeper? That Mom would never agree with him, no matter what he said? Buffy understood his argument, now, though. Per Xander, the vampire in the room—and, by extension, every demon who ever lived—had brought everything that had ever happened or would ever happen to them on themselves just by being what they were. Which… /Spike didn’t exactly ask to be vamped, Xander. Demons don’t ask to be born demons. And… you didn’t exactly ask to be Hyena’d either, not that you remember, so it’s not like I can ask you if you would have deserved to be treated this way after that./

Mom turned to Anya in clear confusion. “You’re dating him.”

“We haven’t yet defined our relationship,” Anya answered. “I had thought that was what we were attempting to accomplish.” It was clear from her expression that she might be currently reassessing that status. 

Xander sank slowly back to the sofa, looking kind of like he had been slapped between the eyes with a very large club.

“But you… Let me see if I understand. You used to be a demon of some kind?”

Tearing her eyes away from the now thoroughly-cowed Xander, Anya turned politely to face Mom. “Yes. A vengeance demon.” She tilted her head a hair, as if considering something. “Well, some of my colleagues prefer the term ‘justice demon’, but I like to call a spade a spade…”

Mom shook her head slightly, looking mildly dazed. Then her gaze skewered Xander, trailed back to Anya, and her mouth firmed. “Then why are you with him, if he clearly has such a terrible opinion of demons? After all, you seem to be an incredibly intelligent young woman. I’d hate to think you have a low self-esteem.”

Anya took that in for a moment… and turned a glare on Xander when he made to leap to his feet. “Sit down, Xander. She was speaking to me.”

Xander subsided and became preoccupied with studying his toes. 

“Well,” Anya answered after a moment’s consideration, “I was very confused when I was first trapped back here, without my powers and stripped of my demon. After a thousand years with it, you can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a part of your being…”

“Bloody hell,” Spike muttered, and his fingers twitched uncertainly. Clearly the very thought horrified him. 

“Exactly,” Anya answered in some satisfaction. “I was reeling. And on top of that, I was being treated like some high school idiot, only because I had been elevated by D’hoffryn when I was approximately their age—an adult by the standards of my own time, and had been for years, keeping my own home, running my own business, living with a man and all that—but here, I couldn’t even order a drink. And I’d lived a thousand years.”

“Christ,” Spike muttered. “I’d stake meself.”

Anya turned glowing eyes on the vampire, clearly drinking in the understanding. “Unfortunately, I don’t have that option, so I’ve had to learn to make do. At first,” she went on, turning back to Mom, “it was very lonely. It is still, sometimes,” she admitted with a little sigh. “Most humans really don’t understand me, and oftentimes I don’t really understand them.”

Buffy frowned internally, for the first time feeling as if she truly got where Anya was coming from. She could feel the edges of that ‘no one gets me’ outsider status because of her slayerhood; that feeling of being older than her peers, aged beyond their comprehension by her responsibilities. Double down on that with a thousand years of living and the jarring experience Anya had had with being stripped of a whole side of herself… /What would it be like to be stripped of my powers and dropped into normal, boring teenagehood?/ Her Cruciamentum had given her a brief taste of what it might be like to lose her abilities, and it had… Well, it had sucked. She had never felt so helpless, knowing what she now knew of the world she inhabited. To have had to continue thus was anathema. And here Anya was, doing just that. 

Jeez, what a really bleak way to live. Buffy had never truly given the other girl her due when it came to serious strength. What a scary realization, to have lost so much all at once, and to have to try to make a life without it.

“So when Xander came along and decided to try to help…” Anya shrugged. “I suppose I’ve clung to him, despite the fact that all of my past told me not to trust a man in any way, that they’re only interested in one thing, and that poorly done most of the time. That they’re generally traitorous creatures. However,” and here she turned back to study the hangdog young man thoughtfully, “he’s proven again and again that his heart is true and that he is in earnest, if in an often clumsy way. And,” she went on, straightening a little and looking abruptly willing to reconsider, “he gives excellent orgasms...”

To one side, Giles could be heard furiously polishing his glasses and muttering about information best kept private, and Willow murmured “TMI, much?” very audibly, under her breath. 

Anya, of course, ignored the standard Scooby prudery as pointless. “...So I have been willing to overlook certain character flaws, in the hopes he might outgrow them.”

Xander flinched. Honestly, Buffy flinched a little as well. But to her surprise, Mom didn’t so much. She just nodded slightly. “Well, that’s a frank appraisal. And, honestly, I don’t blame you for hanging on to him, considering. Especially when it comes to that last, since God knows it’s hard to come by these days with any man; certainly at that age.”

Xander turned a shade of bright plum. 

“Well, I did have to give him some coaching, but he’s coming along nicely. And aside from the demon issue, he’s proven an excellent companion as I navigate these new waters, so I had decided the pros outweighed the cons and that I’d keep him around.” 

“I suppose that was very logical of you at the time,” Mom agreed.

“Thank you, Joyce.” Anya looked positively delighted to be so complimented, but her expression swiftly faded to a troubled frown. “I might have underestimated how very much he despises everything about what I used to be, where I come from, and who many of my friends are. That could become a very serious and ongoing problem…”

Xander shot to his feet. “Ahn, seriously, it’s not…”

“Not now, Xander.” Anya was brooking no more nonsense. “Right now we have an invasion to deal with, and these demons  _ are _ bad. You can feel very justified in causing them harm without it in any way threatening your current mindset. We’ll revisit the many ways in which there are thousands of demon types, all with extremely variable alignments, preferences, tolerances, and cooperative abilities, after this is all over, in the hopes that you might adjust your views.”

Xander stared at her, his face settling now on a sort of gray hue.

Buffy honestly kind of understood how he felt about this massive challenge to his worldview, but… Was it possible that he had been even more virulently intolerant than she had been?

Mom leaned toward Anya, looking worried. “I hope you can work it out. With the background you have, I doubt anyone has to warn you to avoid getting yourself mired in anything that’s… bad for you. I’d be concerned, otherwise; and that’s not only my motherly side speaking, since you still look like a girl my daughter’s age, but a woman-to-woman concern. After all, goodness knows, if you’ve lived for a thousand years…” 

Anya waved her hand. “No offense taken, Joyce. I may have lived a thousand years, but this dating business is new; at least with humans, anyway. I appreciate your concern. I’ll take it into consideration.” And she eyed Xander pensively. “My goodness, I should come by here more often. No offense to the rest of you,” she went on, turning her gaze to the Scooby-covered room, “but I miss speaking to other adults.”

Which, well… from Anya’s perspective, they really probably weren’t. With the exception of Giles, and he was basically boring as heck. Not to mention that he tended to rabbit anytime anyone talked about sex, which was approximately half of Anya’s incredibly candid conversation. 

“Ooookay,” Buffy broke in, trying once more to take up the baton. “No firebombing Willy’s, check. I might even need to find a way to get him out of there… Hm. Maybe a couple of us can go in and pull a rescue run while the rest of us are drawing the Hellions off somewhere else. The question is still, where?” She glanced around her assembled team, hoping for some lightbulbs. “Any other ideas?”

“I don’t know where, but I do know how,” Anya put in diffidently.

“Oh? Let’s hear it.”

“Well.” The ex-vengeance demon looked exceedingly proud to be bringing the key to the puzzle to bear. “One thing I noticed when I was down in St. Louis cursing those idiots back in the twenties was that they set great store by brotherhood…” 

“I bet you looked just adorable in a flapper dress…” Mom interrupted.

Anya’s smile broadened, and it was clear she was flattered. “Oh, you have no idea. I haven’t enjoyed a dress—or an era—so much since the fall of the Russian Empire. Well, except for that one brief interlude with the blood larvae, but really, that doesn’t bear discussion right now…”

“Oh, did you meet Anastasia?” Mom demanded excitedly.

“Oh, good Lord,” Giles murmured.

“She wasn’t actually as interesting as everyone makes out.”

“Oh, really?”

“Blood larva?” Buffy asked, wondering if she should feel queasy but also praying she could keep her mother off of the whole Anastasia thing, or they’d never get back on track. Mom was nuts over that whole mystery, talked about it non-stop. Her and Princess Diana.

“It’s a wedding thing. Uncomfortable dresses to dance in, but the  _ party _ …”

Buffy held up a hand to forestall any further elaboration. “I’ll take your word for it. Now, biker brotherhood?”

“Oh, yes. They have that whole manly code thing; you know, you hurt one of us, you hurt all of us, don’t pick a fight with my brother or you’ve picked a fight with the whole gang and blah, blah, blah…” She made a bored sort of face. “Even when they're rough with each other, they’re pretty serious about that code business, so I think they would definitely all come for one of their guys if we kidnapped him…”

A slow, delighted smile began to make itself known on Spike’s previously-irritated mug. 

/Oh, crap. No, we’re not going to do revenge-torture, Spike./ “Okay, I get how you’d think so, Anya, but it took like a day and a half for these guys to even bother to check in when two of their guys went all radio-silent on ‘em the other day…”

“Yes, but they didn’t know anything was wrong for sure. For all they knew, those Hellions you killed might have just gotten drunk under a bridge, or found a really good party and forgot to come home to roost. If they know for sure you’ve taken one of their people—and the motorcycle; that’s important, they’re very protective of the motorcycles—then they’ll all come.”

Buffy shot Spike a querying glance; one that said, without words, ‘What do you think?’

He answered her with a quirk of the lips and a tiny half-shrug that said, ‘Sounds fun, luv. I’m in.’ “What’s the worst could happen, pet?” he pronounced aloud.

/You’re such a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants dope. No wonder you’ve never beaten me./ “Okay, I guess that’s as good a plan as any. And then we pick a spot, lure them all there with their stolen buddy, and drop the hammer on ‘em.” Buffy frowned. “We just gotta figure out what we’re gonna use for the hammer…”

“Would you  _ please _ stop that,” Xander begged, sounding breathless and aggrieved.

Buffy turned to stare at him, now thoroughly confused. “Stop what, Xander?” The fight had gone out of his voice, but he just sounded so revolted that she couldn’t fathom what his problem was.

“Talking to him like he’s a part of this.” A wave of the hand, encompassing their small group. “Like he’s a friend. Letting him call you…” His mouth twisted. 

/What did he call me?/ Buffy scanned her memory of the last second or two of conversation and was honestly at a loss as to what Spike might have said to provoke this level of disgust from her friend. 

Oh, well. It hardly mattered. Xander was never going to be okay with any of this. /He’s never gonna accept Spike even being my friend, much less…/ She felt the tremors start in her hands, spread to her heart. /So I have to decide; am I okay with Xander being not okay… Or do I… let this go?/

Something inside her fluttered madly. Threatened to tear away; somewhere deep inside her solar plexus. It felt like the threat of death; like being torn in two. The terror of people she loved leaving her, the threat of her worst fear, hovering… 

Then something hit her with the weight of a Mack truck. /But… I’m letting him threaten to leave me to make me act the way he wants me to, aren’t I? Like… Like Anya was. But  _ she _ stopped him, stood up, left instead because… Because it doesn’t  _ feel _ good. But I’m still sitting here, letting him… treat me in a way that doesn’t feel good because I’m scared he’ll leave. Because I hate it when… When guys leave. Because I don’t want him to leave, and I don’t want Giles to leave, and.../

/And Spike  _ won’t _ ./

And knowing that felt  _ good _ .

She could stand up and step aside, like Anya did, and take that power away from Xander. Because she was important to Xander too. /I’m important enough. I just have to believe that… he loves me enough to come after me. I don’t have to keep… chasing people and begging them to love me, and taking what they give. I can  _ choose _ ./

Turning her eyes on Spike, Buffy pulled in a deep breath… and made her choice. Because that sense of rightness, that moment of simple impact when she had realized that she wasn’t alone anymore… /I can’t  _ lose _ that./ Not those frozen instants where she had felt surcease, lighthearted joy, and not that solid, real, firm sense of something she could count on. God, just the sheer  _ relief _ of it. She had had some of it before, but not all of it. Never all of it. Not before now. 

Not like this. /And I  _ need _ it. I have to choose what brings me happiness, not what brings me… safety. Staying still is safe and moving is scary… but I didn’t realize that I was still just sitting on that bed in that apartment in LA, holding on tight to that sword, with blood on my hands. I need to get up and move on, and remember that… things can change. That they do, because that’s what life  _ is _ ./

And maybe… Xander did too. “You said, ‘like a friend’, Xan. And that’s the part that you really can’t deal with. Because a vampire stole your friend, didn’t he? And then he couldn’t be your friend anymore.”

“Oh, Goddess,” Willow whispered. It sounded like a prayer.

“Buffy,” Xander snapped, “what the heck are you even talking about?” But his voice had gone bleak, hard.

It was time to push. “You know what I’m talking about, Xander. But let me ask you this. Did Jesse ask for what happened to him?”

_ “What?”  _ All submission immediately vanished, Xander whirled on her, livid.

“Did he ask for it,” Buffy repeated patiently. “To be sired, turned into a vampire?”

“Wait, who the bloody hell is Jesse?”

“Oh, dear Lord, this is a can of worms best opened another time.”

_ “No,” _ Xander snapped angrily, “but he wasn’t Jesse anymore after it happened. I would’ve treated that…  _ thing _ who took him over the same way I’m treating Spike. Because it  _ killed _ my friend.”

“Oh.” Buffy saw the realization wash over Spike’s face, caught him nodding slightly as if understanding, finally, what it was between himself and Xander that was causing all the trouble. He sat back then in his low-backed seat, frowning, fingering his lips with beringed fingers and looking pensive.

“Then you’d be abusing all that was left of Jesse, too,” Buffy told her friend quietly.

Xander gaped at her, and his face hardened. “There was  _ nothing _ left of Jesse. Just a soulless demon wearing him like a costume!”

“No,” Buffy rebutted, low and firm. “There was a hungry baby demon in there, high on the power of the hellmouth and roaring with the new life of the demon’s  _ soul,” _ and here she shot a pointed glare in Giles’ direction. Saw him wince and look away, “and yeah. He just got here, so that was all we saw; all demon, all the time. Human parts totally submerged. But he was new here. He had to learn how to be human and live in this dimension from somewhere, so he had all of Jesse’s memories.” She leveled her friend with a pointed stare. “And not just his memories. Believe me, Xander, if you believe nothing else. Vampires can feel emotion. Which means underneath all of that fledgling grr, Jesse was still capable of remembering how he felt about you in his human life. It was just whether those feelings were important for keeping his baby demon self alive. Everything else wasn’t as vital right then.”

Xander glared, rage suffusing every part of him. “Sure,” he grated. “The evil demon was just going to give me a hug, because deep inside, I was still important to him. And that’s why you stake all the little baby vampires, why you would’ve staked him if I hadn’t...” His hands had begun to shake.

“I  _ stake _ them,” Buffy interrupted, “because it’s way more necessary to them right then to get fed than anything else. There’s a reason his nest left him out there on purpose; like a guard dog, starving, knowing that getting a first meal would be way more important to him than talking. There’s no reasoning with hungry fledges for…” She shot a quick glance over at Spike, saw him flicker all his fingers at her once, pause, tilt them from side to side a little to indicate indecision, then flash them again. “At least the first ten, maybe twenty years. Maybe more, depending on the vamp and who trains ‘em. But underneath all that bloodlust, they can still feel, and they can still remember. I  _ promise _ you that.”

Xander cut his eyes away, sneering. “Oh, sure. So if we could’ve just got Jesse fed without killing anyone, you’d have been all buddy-buddy with him again, and I would never have had to… Had to stake my best friend…” His voice shook, his hands going white at the knuckle with how tightly he had his fists clenched.

“Oh, Christ,” Spike muttered under his breath.

There was nothing Buffy could have said that wouldn’t hurt Xander even worse. He had to cling to his beliefs. Either he’d killed his best friend, or he’d killed a demon who had murdered his best friend. One guess which one was the easier narrative to live with. “I’m sorry, Xander,” Buffy heard herself whisper. “I’m  _ so _ sorry there wasn’t more time. That there’s never more time. That I didn’t know. No one ever told me, either.”

Xander didn’t answer, tight-lipped and shaking with rage; the thing that held the thin line between himself and the tsunami of anguish and guilt which might destroy him if he ever believed a word of what she was saying.

Giles leaned forward into the pained silence, eyes stern on Buffy. “Buffy, how much of this information came to you from our current resident vampire? Because trusting the source…”

Clearly he hadn’t missed the byplay between herself and Spike. “Is probably better than trusting a book written a zillion years ago by guys who, I’m guessing from your attitude, probably didn’t trust the source either. Not that I blame them, since the source might have tried to eat them…” Over her shoulder, Spike grinned a little and tapped his fingers restlessly on his jeans, which… Oh. He’d never gotten his cigarette. Man, this was probably a really stressful little meeting for him. And he was being so uncharacteristically silent, like he had made some sort of ‘support Buffy’ vow… except for that one moment when he’d thrown himself on the proverbial grenade, for her. Which had opened up this whole ball of disaster, and wow, he was probably quietly losing it over there. “Anyway, don’t you think a vampire might actually be a better source for how vampires think and feel and behave than, you know, some other demon talking about demons they really don’t like because they don’t fit in anywhere else, because they’re part human?”

Giles blinked at her, looking abruptly thoughtful. “Except, should the source have an agenda, Buffy…”

Something inside of Buffy cracked in frustration. The part of her that had been filling with distrust at the growing evidence of truths withheld, of little white lies and omissions building up over the year, to ‘keep her safe’ but instead making her life more complicated, and scarring her heart with guilt. “What agenda does the Council have when they leave stuff out about vampires and Slayers, Giles, in my big book of ‘teach the Slayer everything she’ll ever need to know to stay alive’?” She bit her lip, frowned. “Why doesn’t the book ever talk about hellmouths, and how there’s more than one…” She saw her friends start in surprise around her, caught a flicker of Spike’s amused smirk out of the corner of her eye. “I know we could all have used that 411 when we were about to die sophomore year, here, huh? How come the Book never mentions that hellmouths have a ton to do with us being Called, but that really, it has more to do with a big Master vamp being around, even, than that? How come it only mentions vamps at all, and doesn’t talk about any other demons but those ones… and still manages to avoid getting into this uber-special relationship I have with vamps?”

With every verbal blow, Giles seemed to shrink, recoiling away from her. Some part of Buffy began to feel a little ashamed of hitting him again and again, but another part of her felt like she was fighting for her life. It made her angry, so she kept swinging; like she was pummeling a heavy bag, had hit a rhythm her lizard brain liked and just couldn’t make her brain override her body. “Why doesn’t it even touch on how it actually  _ feels _ for me to get near different vamps as they age, compared to how it feels to get close to other demons… like, did the Watchers ever even consult Slayers at all? Did we even get interviewed for this book, or are we just subjects in a ‘study’? Because it talks about how we should feel vamps, but it doesn’t even  _ mention _ how hard I feel drawn to them; like they’re my reason for  _ existing _ . Like if I don’t seek them out I’ll  _ die _ , because being around vampires is the only time I ever feel truly alive!” 

Giles actually cringed at this last. Willow, Buffy noticed, looked extremely thoughtful next to him. 

Xander looked horrified.

Buffy was not done. “What happened to ‘the demon soul’ you told me about right before I died, Giles? You’ve conveniently never mentioned that again. It’s just ‘soulless’ this and ‘soulless’ that…”

She could feel Spike grinning again behind her, and wondered if it was for the ‘demon-soul’ business, or for the ‘vampires are my reason for existing’ feature. 

Giles seemed to recover briefly at this last, drew himself up into the safe shroud of academia. “Well, Buffy, for one thing, the term ‘soul’ is a catch-all phrase for so many kinds of spirits, whereas when we say soulless, we are speaking of the eviction of the  _ human _ soul…”

Buffy jerked her head toward the still-upright Anya. “So, Anya, when you got demoned up…”

“Elevated. We call it being elevated.”

“Okay, elevated, did you lose your human soul?”

Anya shrugged it off. “Oh, definitely not. It was still there, the whole time. It was just sort of…” She waved her hand a little in the air, as if searching for the right word. “Shunted off to one side for a while. It learned to tolerate, even enjoy the carnage alongside the demon-soul. After all, my work was exceedingly satisfying…”

Xander was staring at his girlfriend in horror. “You… Your soul…”

“Which one, Xander?” she asked. “Human, or demon. I  _ had _ two.”

He gabbled a little, mouth opening and shutting soundlessly.

“Either way, yes. Otherwise, do you think I’d remember everything? Honestly, Xander. You hear me looking back on my past with nostalgia; even glorying in my past triumphs. Do you think I would do that now if my soul had been gone that entire time, and was just now returned to me, to witness all that I’d done in some kind of human horror?”

No response from the young man she had been… well, dating was a strong word. But, yeah. 

Buffy let it sit for a moment, then exhaled heavily. “We’re getting off track, here.  _ Again _ . This meeting isn’t supposed to be about Xander’s issues with Spike. We don’t have time for any of it. We need to think of a weapon. Something that can smash a bunch of demon bikers in one fell swoop; preferably something we can use from an ambush. And we need to pick a spot for the ambushing…” 

“Spot probably depends on the weapon, luv. Different approaches dependin’ on if you’re planning on rainin’ death from above or attackin’ from the ground, innit?”

“Good point.” Buffy favored Spike with an approving smile. /See everybody?  _ This _ is helpful./

Xander’s head had shot up, and now he was seriously freaking. “Okay, ‘love’?”

Buffy quailed inwardly, but fought to outwardly ignore her friend’s anger-edged demands for explanations. /That, not so much with the helpful./ Maybe if she just refused to engage anymore… “So, I guess, depending on what we’re using, maybe we can try to round ‘em up in one of those warehouse quadrangles down by the tracks—we could get ‘em from the rooftops or ground-level, there—or over there by the shipping yard. Might be easier by the tracks, since it’s closer to Willy’s, and we know our way around better.” She felt a small smile cross her lips. “And we’ve already fought our share of baddies around those warehouses.

“I’d say to put ‘em out of it in the one where I did the Annoying One, but there’s not much left of it after Watcher-boy here torched the sodding place. Not that I blame him. Was a right good show, watching you take on Angelus with just a bit of fire. Damn near cheered my own self.”

“I’d like to say I’m flattered, but it was really rather a poor choice on my part,” Giles answered wryly.

“Wait, hold up. You killed the Anointed One?” Buffy demanded, stunned.

“Oh, yeah.” Spike shrugged as he turned back to her. “Didn’t realize you didn’t know it. Was how I took over.” He made a restless sort of face. “Bloody little git. Ran him up into the sun like a bitty flag on a pole. Titchy, naff bugger.”

Giles was briefly occupied in a tiny, amused choking fit. Buffy eyed her Watcher briefly to make sure he was going to live before she answered her vampire. “Well, um, thanks for helping me out on that one, too?”

Spike grinned at her. “Wasn’t on purpose, but you’re welcome.” He gave a little shrug. “Speakin of old times, seem to remember you bringin’ a rocket-launcher to bear once when you were facin’ some rotten odds, pet. Wish I’d’ve seen it.”

“Huh.” Now Buffy was eyeing him with even greater interest. He didn’t even sound peeved. “I’d think you’d be a little sore over that one.”

He lifted one shoulder, dropped it. “Sour grapes are for the weak. Takes a real man to admit when he’s been beat good and proper. Soddin’ Judge was more trouble than it was worth; and the whole bloody thing was worth it for the look on Angelus’ great ugly mug.”

The admiration in his voice and eyes was plain to anyone who was paying attention. Buffy was having a tough time dragging her eyes away. 

Xander raised his hand, shaking his head as if to get water out of his ears. “Again; can we not with weird nicknames? Seriously;  _ ‘pet’?” _

Again, Buffy ignored him to turn back to the matter at hand. “Unfortunately, I doubt we have time to raid in the military base. And besides, considering that these commandos are apparently involved, they're probably on high alert right now, which means I doubt we'd be able to get in.”

“Pity,” Spike answered grinning. 

“There must be  _ something _ we can use…”

***

They ranged themselves across the mouth of the alley, boxing in the tiny squad of black-clad, light-armor-wearing pigs. Razor counted ‘em up, and his mouth twisted in anticipation.

Five, they could handle. Hell, they were going to whittle these motherfuckers down one by one till they  _ owned _ this shithole. 

Turning, he gave Dome a quick once-over where the bald Hellion sat hunched over and bleeding on his mule. “You holdin’ up, son?”

“I got this,” Dome grated, panting.

“Hell if you don’t.” Razor slapped him on the back, then turned to his boys while the commandos swarmed around ahead of them inside the alley, setting themselves into firing positions. “Seems like the Army’s in town, boys!” Razor told his boys, and lifted his arm. “Give ‘em hell,” he roared.

And dropped it. 

The Hellions charged, and were met with a spray of bullets.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
Now that THAT's out of the way...


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, so... Hehe. Here's the scene that explains why I apparently needed the duster to not be in Spike's possession. Hopefully it's worth it to everyone!

Willow caught her at the door. “Is Xander right to be worried?”

Buffy was jerked to a halt by this abrupt non-sequitur. She lifted her eyes immediately to locate Spike, found him waiting over by his car, safe in the shade under the carport with his gaze locked on her and flickering toward Willow in irritated surmise. 

He lifted a brow at her in question as he pulled his blanket from his head; a silent query as to whether she needed backup. Buffy replied with the faintest shake of her head in the negative, though god knew she certainly felt like she did. /I can handle Willow. I  _ can _ ./ 

Turning back to her friend, she fought not to bite her lip. “Worried about…?” she led, and waited. /If you’re gonna accuse me of breaking ‘the rules’, of doing it wrong, of being a ‘bad girl’, like Faith, then you’re gonna have to say it out loud./ Though, to be fair, even  _ Faith _ had never…

God, she was tired all of a sudden. And they hadn’t even had their war yet. 

“You  _ know _ what I’m asking you, Buffy,” Willow demanded, and any trace of uncertainty was gone from her voice. Her gray eyes had gone almost silver, they were so intense, as she leaned forward, right into Buffy’s face, and grabbed her arm hard around the bicep. “I mean, seriously, what am I  _ supposed _ to think? What are  _ any _ of us supposed to think? You’re here with him, trusting him in your mom’s house, acting like it’s no big, when two days ago you were all for keeping him tied up at night! You’re so relaxed around him; like you wouldn’t stake him if he took a mouthful out of one of us, just slap his nose like a bad puppy…”

Buffy had a brief vision of Spike leaning over to sniff Wil’s neck, of him telling her, ‘Always did think you were a perky one, Red,’ of Willow blushing and then squirming to get away, of having to stalk over and whack him over the head with a newspaper to tell him to stop making her friends nervous. “Wil,” she admonished… and to her horror, there was amusement in her voice. /Not helping, Buffy!/ Willow would so take it the wrong way.

“See? You’re not taking him seriously at all! You’re practically laughing! It’s so not a laughing matter! Of  _ course _ Xander’s mad! I am too, and I bet Giles is also furious! And we have a  _ right _ to be! You’re acting around him the way you did with Angel, in the beginning…”

Buffy winced.

“…All ‘we have a secret communication level no one else understands’, and doing the body language thing, and being all  _ comfortable _ … Do you think we don’t  _ see _ it?” An impatient, flailing sort of gesture. “I thought you said it wasn’t what it looked like, and now… You’re keeping  _ secrets!  _ I mean,  _ God _ , we’ve seen this before, Buffy, and it  _ scares _ me!” 

Okay, Buffy got that. She knew why, but still; she was starting to get upset. It felt like an unfair accusation, especially since… “It wasn’t… then. It is now, but...” God, how to defend this? She knew the situation would be hard to recover from, with Wil, after everything… but dammit, it wasn’t the  _ same _ . She had to make Wil see it. If anyone  _ could _ … 

She opened her mouth to tell Wil that this was different—not that she had any idea how to convince her, when Wil had been through so much during the reign of Angelus—but before she could speak, Wil seemed to fold up into herself, looked briefly down at her toes. “Oh Goddess. Look; I… I get that the spell I did was wrong, and I get how maybe it might have… engendered some unacceptable aftereffects...”

Oh, crap. Now she was taking refuge in book-girl-speak. This was bad.

“…And maybe you trust him now in some way that you shouldn’t.” Wil’s eyes snapped up again, and the urgency was back, swamping all shame. “But don’t you see that it’s just a spell, Buffy? He’s still exactly what he was before! It was the  _ spell _ that made you feel lusty, lovey-dovey feelings for him…”

Buffy held up a hand as a strange realization crested inside her, and spoke in a sort of blank, emotionless wonder. “You’re right. He’s exactly who he was before. We just never knew who that was.”

“Huh?”

“And you know what, Wil? The spell told me to want to marry him, and vice-versa. That’s all.” 

Wil did some more confused blinking. “Can I say again; huh?”

It was really starting to hit Buffy, right between the eyes. It made her want to glance back at Spike; just gaze at him for a moment and consider… everything, through a new lens. “It didn’t say anything about making us act lovey-dovey, or lusty, or anything like that, did it?”

“W… Well, no, but isn’t that part of wanting to get married?”

Buffy lifted her eyes to face Wil head on. “Was that what you were thinking when you said it?” Honestly she somehow doubted it, the way Xander had rattled it off in his recounting. It had all sounded so sniping and offhand.

Wil looked seriously taken aback. “No, I was, um… thinking about how you were spending more time doing Slayer stuff than with me in my time of heartache. I was jealous…”

Buffy blinked at that. /And from that, we got climbing each other like flagpoles? Talk about a misfire!/ She could distinctly recall wearing Spike-shaped goggles for the entire duration of the spell, to the point where it had been difficult to concentrate on blind-Giles and invading demons, much less a friend in emotional pain. “Well, I’d say that if your intent was to get me to pay more attention to you, it kind of backfired.”

“Well,  _ yeah _ ,” Wil answered sarcastically, “but…”

“Because obviously Spike and I have had a thing for each other for a long time. We were just lying to ourselves about it…”

Willow’s eyes bulged in shock. 

“So I guess I should thank you for opening our eyes… Even if it’s been really tough to keep up my denial, and it hurt a lot, these last couple of days, dealing with the consequences…” Might as well make it easier on herself and apportion out the blame appropriately. /I am so not in this thing alone./ If it would make Willow listen, she was all for it. 

Buffy only felt slightly bad about playing the shame card. Wil had been in serious heartache, sure, and she hadn’t realized she’d done the spells she’d done on them all, but now they were into the consequences, and they were just going to have to deal. 

Wil was staring at her now in utter horror. “So… So you  _ were _ in that motel with him because…”

“No. I told you all why. I’m not lying.” And Buffy could not feel any more grateful than now that Spike had helped her tell as much of the truth as possible about that little moment alone.

“But… There wasn’t a scratch  _ on _ him! If he was in there, what did he say? Getting ‘worked over’ by those…” She halted abruptly, and her eyes went wide.

/Shit, shit, shit./ Buffy felt her face go blank, hiding all expression. “He was hurt, and I stayed to help him,” she repeated flatly. “You brought us blood, and once he was healed enough, we came here to help deal with the situation. The end.”

Willow’s face had gone incredibly pale. Her head started to turn, swiveling across the porch to where Spike waited impatiently by his car; far away enough, Buffy prayed, not to hear most of this conversation. 

Buffy yanked her friend’s eyes back with a sharp, “The  _ end _ , Wil.”

Wil’s gaze settled on hers, abruptly horrified and haunted. “They… He…”

_ “No, _ Wil.” Crossing her arms over her chest, she nodded over her shoulder to where Xan and Giles were waiting at Giles’ tiny, weird-looking little European car. “You better go. They’re waiting.” She felt her lips tighten. “You can tell ‘em…” /What? That I’m fine? That you’ve confirmed I’m screwing up again?/ Sighing, Buffy fought for some internal stability. “Tell ‘em whatever you wanna tell ‘em. Or not. I don’t care right now. We have a war to fight. Mini pre-Christmas apocalypse. Joy to the world. I guess if I get coal in my stocking, at least I’ll be warm for a change.” She bit her lip. “I’m tired of being alone.”

Wil looked hugely taken aback by this. “You’re… You…” Her expression shifted then. “You don’t mean in just the, ‘want somebody to date’ sense, do you?”

“No.” /This is so not about wanting a boyfriend./

“And it’s not a ‘sad things didn’t work out with Angel’ thing?”

/Oh my God,  _ please _ stop thinking he’s some kind of plug to put in an Angel-shaped hole!/ “No,” Buffy answered sharply. “This is different.” She met Wil’s eyes firmly. “It’s not just because I’m lonely, and Spike is  _ nothing _ like Angel. Or Angelus,” she pointed out flatly, “or do you think I would have  _ ever _ worked with him, much less let him into Mom’s house, or Giles’ place, or near  _ any _ of us?”

Wil opened her mouth. Closed it abruptly. Shook her head. “And… you’re still… alone, even with… us to help you.”

Buffy closed her eyes. “Wil, the weight of the world’s been on my shoulders since I was fifteen. No one can really share it. And dammit, I want a  _ partner _ .”  
  
“Oh, wow.” Wil’s eyes not-quite jerked over toward the carport. “But… a  _ vampire?” _ she demanded.   
  
“You’d be surprised what he’ll do for a chance to hit things. He’s been pretty caged up.” Buffy felt a faint smile touch her lips then, in spite of herself, and she dropped her crossed arms. “You’d be surprised what he’ll do for me.” And that certainty, new and soaring, felt like hands on her weary shoulders, shifting the yoke.    
  
She felt floaty with the relief from some of the weight.   
  
Wil nodded thoughtfully and started toward the stairs. She looked unconvinced, but willing for the moment to at least wait and see, which was… “Buffy, are you sure it’s okay?” she asked, stopping again at the steps. “The last time…”   
  
“I am so sure, Wil,” Buffy answered, and moved forward to grab Wil’s arm, trying with all her might to telegraph her sincerity. “This is so totally different. I’m trying to be completely aboveboard here. The only secrets I’m keeping are the ones that are not mine to tell. And anyway…” She held her breath briefly, let it out, praying that this reasoning would make as much sense to her bestie as it had made for her, last night. “Don’t you think I’d know? I mean, I’ve seen how it can go wrong. I know what to look out for. That should make me the expert, right?”   
  
Wil stared at her, nonplussed. After a moment, something seemed to click inside her, and a thoughtful expression crossed her face. “I… never really thought about it that way before.”   
  
“Neither did I, till someone brought it up.” /Thank you, Spike./   
  
Wil’s eyes did dart over to the car then, and she frowned uncertainly. “I just…  _ Why _ , Buffy?” She sounded so overwhelmingly confused. “What about Riley, the TA? He’s a nice, normal guy, and remember? Sparkage, and good arms? And…”   
  
Buffy sighed and shook her head. “I’m the Slayer, Wil. There are so many reasons why, in the end, normal doesn’t fit for me. It’s boring, and it can’t keep up. It would’ve ended badly.” God, how many ways she could see it now, how incredibly badly it would always end, that bland ‘normal’ Angel had wanted for her.   
  
“And this…”   
  
Buffy dropped Wil’s arm. Her gaze rose over the railing, met Spike’s sure, steady, blue one. “This, I guess, _is_ my normal.”

***

The stopover was necessary. “Make it quick, though, okay?”

Spike nodded, silent. Made a grab for his blanket, currently draped over the low back of the ancient seat between them. The space between the DeSoto and the manhole cover at the edge of the subsidence was relatively shaded—all the old maple trees that had once lined the now-swallowed Bison’s Lodge would give him good sun-cover—but better safe than sorry.

He reached for the door preparatory to cranking it open. Buffy caught his arm in a quick gesture, wondering if he was mad. It had been, after all, a short but silent ride over here from Revello. “Are you upset?” She hesitated. “Wil was…”

He turned back swiftly, dropped the blanket to catch her cheek in his palm. “Yeah, I am,” he answered, low and quiet. “But not at you. Ragin’ at the way that lot treat you. But it’s not my place to get in the middle of it. Would take somethin’ away from you as is yours to right. Would take away your chance to feel your power. And I see you, Buffy. Gettin’ stronger every time you shout one of ‘em down and realize… you have the right to do it.”

Buffy closed her eyes briefly. Felt herself tremble a little. God, how he saw her. Saw right through. “What about you?” she asked softly. “That can’t have been easy.”

“Wasn’t,” he answered shortly. Clipped. Dropped his hand away. “Their opinions mean jack shit to me, though. All that matters is what they mean to you.” 

She kind of thought she maybe really… /I could really love you./ It was totally terrifying… and really wonderful, and… “What about you?” she repeated it softly, nodding toward the manhole cover. “Do you want me to come with?”

His head jerked up, and he regarded her for a moment in surprise. “What, to face down Harm?”

She shrugged lightly, totally unfazed at the thought of throwing some shade at his ex. /If you can even call her that./ Buffy really rather doubted Spike had loved Harmony, of all people. Not like he still loved, would always love Drusilla, and not like he seemed to love her, now. That had to have been just a convenience thing; something even less than the Xander-and-Anya show. 

Buffy honestly could not imagine anyone putting up with Harmony for very long and actually enjoying her company. Maybe that was a jerkish thing to think, but… 

Besides; she was kind of starting to notice a trend with Spike. He didn’t fall for shallow socialites. He went for ‘deadly, powerful, maybe a little nuts’. /The truth hurts, I’m not the most stable, sometimes. I mean, I’m not Missus McNutbar like his sire, and compared to her he probably means it that we would be easy to him… but I’ve been through some stuff. I’m not your average college kid./

Your average college kid, for one, didn’t spend her nights killing things, risking her life, facing death, hadn’t already died once, and didn’t occasionally go through moments of complete, lifeless, unfeeling detachment she couldn’t shake for the life of her.

/Anyhoo…/ “Yeah. You know. In case she starts… whatever. Talking too much. After all, we are on a deadline, here…”

Spike’s lips twitched, and his eyes warmed. “You just wanna hold a stake on her in case she tries to put the moves on me.”

“Well, there’s that.” Buffy had actually had a few brief but very enjoyable visions on the way over that had involved holding Harmony at stake-point and making threatening noises in her direction if she said word one about Spike’s having moved on up the food chain, but the less said about that, the better. It would give Spike a big head.

Heck. Her easy admission alone turned him sinuous, and he swiveled on the seat to wrap his arms around her. “Oh, bloody hell, Slayer. That, I’d pay to see.”

Buffy smiled slightly, tucked her face briefly into the crook of his neck and shoulder, and found herself amazed—almost shudderingly relieved—at how incredibly good it felt to be embraced by him. He wasn’t huge, didn’t loom, didn’t feel like he was trying to protect her from the world or take anything away from her. He was just… there. Present. Cool against her, his arms around her not too tight, but just enough pressure so that, as the world fell apart around her, she felt… held-together. /God, I… Haven’t we already done this?/ 

It was almost weird to realize that they hadn’t. Not since the spell.

It seemed way too long ago now, and Buffy tightened her arms briefly about his ribcage to luxuriate for a moment in the sensation before folding her fingers in his tee to pull back slightly and catch his eye. “You’ve been there for me,” she reminded him softly. Her quiet bastion of strength as she’d faced down everyone she loved. “It’s the least I can do.” And she let a little smirk of her own color her lips. “Besides… Harmony was a bitch in high school. It’ll be kind of awesome to take a guy away from her now.”

Spike rolled his eyes. “Oh, Christ, did I just step into the middle of some sodding teen drama?”

“Oh, shut up. You watched  _ so _ much TV when you were at Giles’ house. Tell me you didn’t watch, like, soap operas. You were  _ so _ bored…”

“Oi!  _ Passions _ is not a bloody soap opera! It’s grand entertainment! It has witches and poppets and soulmates and loads of other supernatural…”

“I rest my case.” Buffy rolled her eyes and scooted away toward her own door.  _ “Passions? _ _ Really? Mom _ watches _Passions!”_

“Always did say Joyce has excellent taste.”

Shaking her head, Buffy cranked her door open. “If you ever break up with me, it’ll be for my mother.”

“Bite your tongue, Buffy.”

She held up the manhole cover for him to jump down out of the brief flickers of sunlight showing through as the light breeze tossed the tired winter leaves around, then followed him down. Paced him at his right as he marched silently through a short network of tunnels she recognized vaguely from their brief visit down here to figure out what he had taken out of the treasure room he’d excavated a month and a half ago. “She might not even be here anymore,” Spike pointed out, low and hopeful, as they made a turn that, as far as Buffy could determine, led away from the treasure-area and toward some other branching of tunnels. “Might’ve just taken some of the loot and made a run for it.”

“You think?” Buffy frowned pensively. To be real, if it were her in Harmony’s position, jilted and with access to tons of gold and crap, she might have done the same. Which, okay, kind of sucked now that she thought about it. It would speed things along, but Buffy had to admit to herself now that she was maybe looking forward to facing down the airhead vamp. Just a little bit. 

But only a little. /One, she attacked Wil, which is just not okay. Though I guess so did Spike, which means… Oh crap./ Things to deal with later. Moving resolutely on. /Two…/ Buffy’s eyes fell on Spike’s shoulder where he stalked beside her in the gloom. “She was here a little bit ago, though, right? When you first got away from the commandos?”

Spike grunted laconically. “Was, yeah.”

That answered that. And a lot more. “She didn’t help you.”

A short silence. “Did hurt her feelings, Buffy. Left her high and dry the minute I had the Gem. Not the sort of thing a bird takes kindly to.”

Buffy supposed she could understand that… but to turn away a guy you’d been sleeping with when he was starving and sun-sick and desperate for help seemed a little bit harsh. She got that vampires weren’t large with the empathy, but that seemed pretty cruel even by Harmony’s standards. /Like a thoughtless socialite needs a vamp-demon on top of everything to make her even more petty./ “She could’ve at least fed you.”

Spike swiveled his head to eye her through the murk. “You actually cheerin’ for Harm to have handed me some poor, drained pulser so I would’ve been less of a mess when I showed up at Watcher’s door?”

/Well, that sounded all kinds of bad from a Slayer perspective, didn’t it?/ “Okay,” Buffy defended, “I’m not saying I’m defending her right to just indiscriminately kill the people I’m sworn to protect… but if she had someone down here already dead—which you say is kind of the practice—then why wouldn’t she at least share the… The…” 

“Leftovers?” Spike put in helpfully. He sounded sardonic in the gloom, damn him. 

“Okay, you know what? I’m done talking.”

“I love you, Buffy.”

Buffy closed her eyes and shivered in the darkness. “You completely wreck everything about how I work.”

“I know it. Don’t mean to put your head through the wringer, luv… but it’s bloody nice to know how much you care.” Then his head jerked up; a near-silent sound she only heard because it came accompanied by a general cessation of movement from the rest of his toned bod. She could feel the tension radiating off of him, heard him sniffing; could picture his wary, predator’s stance. “She’s there. Smell her.”

“Well, that’s… something.”

They kicked into motion again, rounded a final bend. Buffy saw a faint glow emerging from somewhere off to the left. They followed the light, slipped into a smaller service tunnel, and exited in a moment into a small, damp cavern hollowed out at some point by god alone knew what. (Always best not to ask questions like that when you were under Sunnydale.) 

When they stepped through the tiny aperture, Harmony’s head popped up, and she swung around in shock. Obviously they had taken her by surprise. _“Spikey?”_ she squealed, sounding amazed and almost pleased. 

/Spikey?/

Then, as he stepped aside to fully admit Buffy, “Buff… I mean…  _ Slayer, _ ” she hissed, trying to sound all dire and evil. 

It was amusing; partly because Harmony was about as terrifying as a toy poodle, standing there in her hot pink, sparkly-unicorn babydoll tee, and partly because it was exceedingly clear from whom she had stolen that low, mock-dangerous tone. She had even managed a poor copy of the accented lilt. /Hee! You’re hilarious if you think you’re even a little bit menacing, Harmony./ 

Buffy flicked her eyes at Spike and fought not to smile too hard. Sincerest form of flattery, right? 

Spike was not smiling, though. “Hey, Harm. See you haven’t moved on yet.”

Harmony’s eyes bounced from Buffy back to Spike again, and her tones went uncertain. “Uh, yeah, well, you know…” She touched her neck, where about two dozen huge, heavy, gold necklaces lay, draped all over the tops of each other; a fiesta of wealth from the Amara treasure. “I was seriously ready to bail. Where have you  _ been? _ I mean, you show up, you say those soldier-guys did something to you and you can’t bite, beg me for some food, then you vanish. You don’t even come by to say hi, you leave me all lonely; and now you’re  _ back _ , looking totally  _ fine _ again, just when I’m about to give up and leave…” Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “And you bring  _ Buffy?” _

/Okay, whine much?/ And, wow, it really sounded like Harmony had actually been hanging around here just in case Spike came back, which… was kind of sad. 

Was she really more hung up on Spike than Spike had ever been on her? Not that Buffy would blame her if that were the case, but it was kind of depressing considering the circumstances.

“Yeah, it’s a long story. Don’t let me stop you makin’ tracks, Harm. You can just toddle along to… what is it? LA? Goin’ to make your fortune as an actress with your friend, the brunette bird? What was her name?”

“Cordelia,” Buffy supplied, bemused.

“That’s the one. Best of luck, then. If you come across him, give Angel my regards, tell the poof I said hullo.” 

Wow, he was being such a jerk. What, was he uncomfortable? Buffy turned to study his profile in the low light, curious. What should he have to be uncomfortable about? Unless it was because she was here, and Harmony was here, and he felt weird about it, which…

/Hm. Interesting./

Spike very distinctly avoided her eye, as well as Harmony’s very clear attempts to catch his gaze, casting instead all about the chamber in search of his missing accoutrement. “Meantime, you seen my duster in here anywhere?” Moving further into the chamber, he started poking under and around various empty-looking crates and things, seeking the object they’d come here to retrieve. 

He looked tense. 

/Double-interesting./ What was he so worried about? That she and Harmony would start comparing notes or something? Because, unlikely much.

“Wait. You only came here for  _ that _ old thing?” Harmony’s voice started to ascend to screech-pitch. “Are you  _ serious? _ I  _ stayed _ here, I  _ waited _ for you to come back, and you just  _ waltz _ in here and… And tell me that… That you came back for a  _ jacket? _ ”

“It’s a bloody fine coat, that one,” Spike informed her, roughly pulling out what looked like a box stacked with women’s blouses, all still bearing their sales tags. Stolen, no doubt. The whole slew of them slithered to the nasty, damp cavern floor. He ignored their demise to stride by, prodding at another pile of who knew what ill-gotten gains. “Loads of history in every pore and tender, loving care in every stitch. Buffy, luv, you see it anywhere?”

Lips twitching at Harmony’s shocked glare, Buffy shrugged. “No, but it’s not like I know any of the hidey-holes around here.” She glanced around the room, tilted her head. “Have to admit, though, Harmony, you’ve done a decent job with the interior decorating.”  _ God _ , there were a lot of unicorns going on in here; a couple of cheap statuettes here and there around the bed—one with a price-tag still dangling from a hoof—another one over there on top of a crate; like, obsess much? Harmony had even managed to get a unicorn poster to stay tacked to the stone wall, somehow, though the condensation was swiftly ruining it. Little rivulets of rock-sweat were bleeding through the thick poster-paper to make the poor, defenseless rainbow-unicorn look all bubbly and warped. “I see you have a theme going.”

“Do you like it?” Harmony chirped, shifting instantly from jilted girlfriend to bubbly high-schooler in less than zero seconds. “I just  _ love _ unicorns. I could never get enough of ‘em when I was younger, but my dad wouldn’t let me buy any more. He said I had enough in my room, so I said to myself, I said, ‘Harmony; when you move out on your own, you can have as  _ many _ unicorns as you want!’ So here I am, in my own place…” She swiveled then to shoot Spike a glare. “I mean, as soon as  _ some _ people moved out, anyway, since  _ some _ people  _ hated _ the unicorn thing and didn’t want me to have  _ any _ , because  _ some _ people thought they were ‘pansy’, whatever  _ that _ means…”

“Unicorns are for virgins, Harm,” Spike sniped as he poked under a pile of debris, “and I’ll wager you haven’t been one of those since you were a lot sodding younger than…”

Harmony broke and flew at him. “You take that back, Spike!” she screeched, nails out and clawing. “Unicorns are for  _ everyone! _ Unicorns would love me even if I’m… I’m…”

Spike swung around, caught the flailing hands by both wrists, grinned broadly. “Doubt they’re for vampires either, innit? Bloody undead killers, evil an’ that…”

Harmony’s eyes filled with tears.

Alright, this was so a bad, bad relationship. 

Buffy stepped in, hands held out. Shoved in between them. “Okay, okay, let’s everybody take a deep breath, here. Let her go, Spike. Harmony, he’s just being a dick, okay? You’re better than this, right? You know unicorns will love you even if you’re a vampire…” She shot Spike some serious glare-age, just daring him to open his snide mouth again.

Smirking and rolling his tongue, Spike disengaged from the now-sagging Harmony to turn back to his search.

With a heavy sigh, Buffy tugged the almost-sobbing vampire-chick away from her ex and over to her bed. Nudged her firmly down. “Look. You can do better, right? You’re your own woman. I bet you’re happier now that you can do whatever you want to this place, huh? Have as many unicorns as you want, go wherever you want…” /I mean, I have Mr. Gordo. Who am I to talk?/ She shot Spike a faintly venomous look over her shoulder. /And if you give me crap about my pig, you and I will have  _ words _ , buddy./ “Why are you even here waiting for him to come back, if things were always so bad between you?”

Harmony looked down into her open palms, lying wounded in her lap. Hitched a couple of sobs. “I don’t know. You’re probably right. It’s just… He’s my Blondie-Bear, you know? When things were good, they were really,  _ really _ good…”

“That was just sex, Harm,” Spike intoned flatly from across the room, and threw aside something that made a resounding crash. “Where the bloody hell  _ is _ it?”

Buffy really kind of wanted to throw something  _ at _ him. 

Harmony lifted red, swollen eyes at Buffy. “Okay, he’s kinda right. But the sex was really, really good. And…”

/I so don’t wanna hear this…/

“And sometimes he could be… kinda nice…”

“Lyin’ to yourself an’ you know it. I was never nice to you.” Spike straightened, sighed heavily. “Was awful to you, Harm. Don’t blame you for holding my soddin’ duster hostage, but I need it back. You saw what’s happenin’ upstairs, yeah?”

Harmony’s quivering lip stilled briefly. “Oh, you mean those creepy biker guys? I almost asked one out—I’ve never been on a motorcycle, especially one of the rumbly ones—but he was so mean to me that I told him to go to hell instead.” 

“Yeah, well, vamps aren’t all that popular with that set,  _ mon petit boudin _ .* I’d stay away, were I you. Keep your head down.”

Buffy frowned at the twisted tone to the French words. One might assume that was some sort of endearment, which should make her jealous, but French could be tricky. “My little huh?”

Spike grunted and pushed over a stack of terrifyingly-bright, unicorn-fronted Lisa Frank spiral notebooks. “Sausage,” he answered briskly. “Harm!”

“Oookay.” Even if Buffy’s high school French was bad, she had learned enough from playing around on the internet with Wil and Xander to know that French insults were bizarre and unexpected and usually had something to do with food. As such she had a sneaking suspicion that had so not been a friendly thing to call Harmony, even if the rough sentiment had been one of concern. 

Harmony, though, seemed to have taken it for an endearment, for she softened, relaxed slightly to gift them with a slow frown. “The thing is, they look like they’re really having fun up there, but they’re also really messing things up. I couldn’t find anyone to eat, the way all the humans are hiding from ‘em…” Her eyes swiveled to Buffy. “Sorry, but it’s true. And did you  _ see _ what they did to ‘Dress For Less’?”

Buffy felt a pang go through her heart. “Please say they didn’t burn it.”

“To the ground. And the Boot Barn is gone, too. They totally trashed it…”

Buffy was going to  _ end _ them. “Please, Harmony. Where’s his coat? We need to go fight these guys, get ‘em out of town so we can start to pick up the pieces…”

Harmony sighed and put her face in her hands. “Fine,” she mumbled into her palms. “It’s over there, behind that stack of rocks…”

Spike groaned. “It’ll be all over dust…” he muttered, striding over to the far side of the room, and began shifting stones.

Soon he would find the coat, and they’d be out of here. And while Buffy had an alliance with one vampire—a preternaturally-controlled one—she couldn’t extend that alliance to another, no matter how much sympathy she had for the woman at this moment. “Harmony, I need you to promise me something.”

Harmony turned back to look at Buffy, blinking away her drying tears. “Huh?”

“I don’t wanna have to stake you. I feel really bad for the way things went between you and Spike. And right now, I’ve got bigger fish to fry. I dunno if you’re even staying in town or not, but if you are, I need you to promise me that you’ll… try to control yourself when you eat. Keep the people alive, even if it means you have to hunt every night.”

Spike snorted behind her, still shifting rocks. Clearly he didn’t think much of his ex’s self-control.

“Or,” Buffy went on doggedly, “if you don’t think you can do that—if you don’t think you can stop before it’s too late—use the money you get from selling this stuff to buy hospital blood or something. Because otherwise, if you keep killing people, I’m going to  _ have _ to stake you. And look; I get it. You’re just eating. But it’s my job to protect humans. Not to mention they’ve been through enough in the last few days, okay?”

Harmony stared at her as if she was nuts. “But, if I don’t… I mean…” She frowned as she worked her way through it. “God, Buffy, do you know how incredibly much  _ work _ that would be? And I don’t even know how much the hospital stuff costs, or how it tastes…”

“Like preservatives,” Spike snapped. “And it’ll cut into your shoe budget. But considerin’ this Boot Barn of yours is gone… Aha!” Straightening with a flourish, he tugged out his coat, flapped it hard. A cloud of dust  _ poofed _ off of it to billow around him, briefly obscuring his triumphant form. “Right, then. Stake her or not and let’s be off, luv. Got some demons to kill, innit?” And, looking thoroughly pleased with his life, he swung the jacket around his shoulders, shoved his arms into the sleeves… and resolved promptly into the familiar, swaggering, boisterous creature Buffy knew so well as her former enemy and co-combatant.  
  
Harmony shot to her feet, indignant and horrified. “You’d let her  _ stake _ me?”

“Bit busy, Harm. ‘S the Slayer’s town, right? An’ I can’t fight her with this thing in my skull the soldiers put there, so it’d be on you to stop her. I’d cheer you on, a’ course, but I don’t think you’d beat her in a fight.”

Buffy wondered if he was actually  _ trying _ to turn her off right now with this display of boorishness. “Spike, stop being a massive dick. Harmony, just tell me now. Are you gonna try to live by my rules, or are you gonna leave town?”

Harmony sighed and looked down again. “I guess… I’ll go. I don’t think I could stop myself like Spike does. It’s just… such a rush.” She lifted her eyes to Buffy’s, pleading. “You have  _ no _ idea. Maybe if I was old and boring like him…”

“Oi!”

“And anyway, it really sucks here right now. I don’t have any friends, and I have to fight all these other demons to keep ‘em off the treasure. None of ‘em wanna be my friends; they all just want stuff out of the cave. It’s so much  _ work _ .”

“I bet,” Buffy answered quietly. “You’re pretty young to have to try to hold a territory all on your own.” She couldn’t believe she was being this sympathetic to a vampire. That she was letting one leave who was announcing her every intention to march off and go hunt somewhere else. This would definitely entail a call over to Angel—or, Buffy supposed, Cordelia, since it was Cordy who mostly answered the phones over at Angel Investigations, and Buffy had mostly made it a point to avoid talking to her ex—to warn them about who was on her way into town. “Just go, before I change my mind.” She patted Harmony’s hand. “And don’t forget to pack your unicorns.”

“Oh, I won’t!” A sizzling glare was sent in Spike’s direction.

“And Harmony?” Buffy added as she turned away.

“Yeah?” The ex-cheerleader was already looking around her at her tossed quarters, obviously a little at a loss for what to do first. 

“Remember what I said about the hospital thing. I don’t want us to have a problem. And if you go to LA, you’ll have one with Angel for the same reason. The safest way to avoid that is to just… not eat people.”

Harmony sighed. “It just sounds so…  _ icky _ . And boring.”

“Could be worse, Harm,” Spike answered tensely, and headed for the door. “You should taste pig’s blood. Or, rather, you shouldn’t. Like drinkin’ direct from the trough.”

Buffy winced. Harmony just stared at him as if he had lost his mind. 

As she drew even with Spike, Buffy elbowed him. Spike grunted, rubbing his side, then sighed heavily and threw over his shoulder, “Take care of yourself, then.”

Harm watched him for a moment, and then tears filled her eyes again, and her lower lip wobbled. “Is this really goodbye, Blondie-Bear?”

“Yeah. Hope you manage alright out there. Maybe I’ll see you in an ad when I’m watchin’ telly sometime.”

And just like that, the tears turned off, like they were controlled by a tap. “Oh, you say the  _ nicest _ things! Doesn’t he say the nicest things?”

“Yeah. He can. Good luck, Harmony.”

They made their escape, worked their way back down toward the main corridors in silence. Buffy held her peace until they reached the first fork before she couldn’t stop herself anymore. Then,  _ “Blondie-Bear?” _ she demanded as they sloshed back down the central tunnel.

“Oh, shut it, Slayer.”

“You don’t even have any body hair. I have never seen a guy who was less bear-like in my entire…”

“Oh, I’ve got some, luv. Only, you haven’t investigated the spots yet.”

Buffy was glad her blush was hidden in darkness. It made her bold. “Yeah, but those aren’t blond.”

He came to a dead stop. “Thought you weren’t lookin’.”

Buffy kept right on walking. “I wasn’t. I don’t ogle. Much. But, you know. It seems a little extreme to bleach things south of the border when you didn’t even bother to do your eyebrows…”

Spike drew even with her, a contemplative rumble sounding under his breath in the darkness; one that turned swiftly amused. “Got me there. Lot of bloody work, eyebrows.” He grinned then, big enough she could hear the teasing challenge in his voice. “And, you can feel free to ogle me anytime, Slayer. Or even do empirical research, in the interest of testing your theory.”

/And, back come the blushies./ “I’ll, um, take that under advisement.” And she punched him, hard, on the upper arm.

“Ow!” He rubbed his shoulder and leaned away from her, looking put-upon. “What the bloody hell was that for?”

“You’re a jerk. Why are you such a jerk to Harmony?”

“Oh, c’mon, pet. As if you’re her biggest bloody fan…”

“She was hurting. You made it worse.”

“Oh, bloody hell, here comes the women’s solidarity bit…”

“I’m just saying, if you wanna impress me, I like your chivalrous side a lot better than your snarky asshole side. That just makes me miss hitting you.”

He swung around and laid a hard, abrupt kiss on her, startling in its suddenness; smack on the lips. “Sorry luv. Attitude comes with the coat.” And then he was striding away again, off into the dark like a distant, swishing standard.

Buffy was very abruptly aware that she hadn’t brushed her teeth in two days, and was extremely grateful that he had kept that a surface-level engagement, since she had been way too shocked to respond in any way but to just stand there like a duh. 

She had to jog to catch up to him, grabbed his arm just as he started up the ladder. “Okay, what was that?”

He halted mid-reach. “You got to know me at my lowest, Buffy. But I can’t be… open like that all the time. I came into my second life like that, and Angelus damn near ground me into dust. This is who I am now. I have to stay safe.” He shook his head once, hard in the gloom; a movement so vigorous she made it out easily in the faint light from the storm drain. “You know too much. You know why. So if you can’t handle me when I’m being me…” He went incredibly still, closed his eyes and stopped breathing for a moment. When he exhaled, it was only to finish talking. “Being the me you already knew, then just tell me now. Let me down easy.” He drew in another short, hissing breath before meeting her eyes, a sharp, piercing blue glare and an exhale that sounded pained. And the look in his eyes,  _ god.  _ “Because I’m already in too deep. I love everything about you. I love you when you’re bein’ gentle to me, and I love you when you’re bein’ a bitch.”

/Okay, you know what…/

“I love you,” he insisted, leaning closer, “when you’re that young woman you showed me in that room, who needs someone to really  _ know _ her… and I love you when you’re one-hundred percent-Slayer and you don’t have the time or the patience for my idjit arse.” And he was back; William, the quiet man beneath the punk swagger; the man she had met for the first time in that room. The treasure he had shown her. The gift. “But if you can’t… If you can’t…”

He took her breath away... and he broke her heart. “I can,” she whispered. Closed her eyes for a moment, swallowed. And pulled his hand off the rung, tugged him around to face her. “You just took me by surprise, that’s all.” She lifted her hand to cup his cheek, shook her head. “You know I like this side of you too, right?” She tried a tiny smile. “My punk vampire.” 

His eyes fluttered closed, very briefly, against her palm.

“The one who can _almost_ kick my butt…”

He scoffed, but didn’t say anything.

“And is somehow snarkier than me.”

A little huff, just a rise and fall of his shoulders under black leather. 

Dropping her hand away, she went for philosophical; almost businesslike. “I mean, I didn’t even know the other side till a couple days ago,” she told him quietly, “and I wanted you, so I guess I’m just crazy and like it when you’re kind of an asshole.” She shrugged a little, trying for nonchalant. “It’s just easier when it’s directed at me, so I know what to do with it, or at Xander or Giles, because I know why, or, you know, back when I could punch you in the face when you said something irritating…”

His head rose at that, and his eyes flared, almost glowing and abruptly honey-colored in the gloom. “Christ, I miss fighting you, luv.” He crowded closer, and oh. Oh, God, he had… He was… 

Probably it was just the Slayer blood, considering everything, but still, she shivered, and was powerless not to crowd closer herself. “Maybe… Someday…” For some reason she was having a really hard time right now remembering, A, that they were in a sewer, and B, that they had a battle to fight upstairs, especially since, C, he didn’t seem to mind. Which, whatever. /That’s… up to him, right?/ 

/And Harmony did say he was really good in bed, right?/

/Oh my God, did I just think that?/

Cool lips lowered to trace her neck, making her tremble from head to toe. Nerves that hadn’t reacted the same way since… since the first night she had ever… They were going off right now in a nice little impromptu fireworks display, and… “If… If you…”

“Ready to serve, Slayer,” he murmured, and drew back. And threw her what could only be termed a saucy look in the dim light from the grate above. “In the meantime, pet, we’ve got some fighting to do, yeah?”

“Wh… Oh. Fighting. Right. Fighting. Yeah.” Turning sharply, Buffy collided with his shoulder as she swarmed swiftly up the ladder. 

Below her she could hear him chuckling like a jerk as he untied the blanket he’d left wrapped around the ladder and prepped for his ascent.

***

“So, let me get this straight. That whole thing down at Harmony’s was, what? A test?”

Spike clicked his tongue behind his teeth as he guided the huge, black beast of a car carefully around the devastated block adjacent to Willy’s Place and peered through the hole in the window. “No, luv, that’s just who I am around Harm. It’s not pretty, but it is what it is. Part of the reason I needed to get out, yeah?”

/Well, okay./ “To be fair, she probably didn’t much like who she was around you, either.”

“Bloody hooray for us.”

Buffy shook her head at his snark. “You didn’t sire her, did you?”

His head swung around to zero in on her in amazement. “Why the bloody, buggering hell would I choose someone like that nit for so much as a minion, much less a childe?”

So, this was a case of ‘Buffy sticks her foot in her mouth over vampire stuff’, again? “Uh, well, she kind of made it sound for a sec like you were showing her the ropes a little…”

Spike turned away again, let the car creep slowly forward. “Yeah, well, her prick of a sire wasn’t about, and she knew sod-all about the business. Woke up after your graduation debacle, alone and tryin’ to get along without a single buggerin’ clue, poor brainless chit. I caught her in the middle of a hunt, and she fumbled it badly, so I showed her a thing or two to help her get by. One thing led to another, an’ afore I knew it I was stuck with the mindless bint hangin’ all over me like I was the bleedin’ second coming, thinkin’ we were soddin’ engaged or some such shite…”

She would not laugh. She would not. But that would so be Harmony’s MO. Any time any guy showed even the tiniest modicum of interest back in high school, did her the slightest kindness… Though, to be fair, she had always pretty much lived in Queen C’s shadow, and probably deep inside her self-esteem was basically crap. She was a barnacle the instant she thought someone gave a damn about her, which might say bad things about her family life, too, but… Well…

The story also said a few unintentionally nice things about Spike, for all he was trying hard to be brusque and unaffected. He’d already informed Buffy as to the extreme depths of his disgust when it came to leaving fledges alone to fend for themselves. Probably he had felt pity for the lost—and pretty—bimbo of a fledge, and had let the combination of righteous indignation, concern, and sexual deprivation get the better of his impulsive (lack of) judgment when Harmony’s (equally impulsive, demon-fed) infatuated gratitude had inflamed his demon-y libido. And, all of a sudden, he had been stuck with the morning after from hell, because apparently he hadn’t been able to shake her, and said morning after had lasted for months. 

/And let that be a lesson to all the vamps out there when it comes to keeping their demon-y bits in their pants./ “This is like the vampire version of an _After_ _School_ _Special_, isn’t it?” she asked him, all innocence. 

The car screeched to a hard stop behind the sagging warehouse sitting at right-angles to Willy’s. Spike’s eyes flashed murder at her. “Summers,” he informed her, “I will kill you in your sleep if you make fun of me. I went in there with the best of intentions. I did not expect to get saddled with a…”

“Yeah, yeah, tell me later.” Buffy frowned and leaned forward to peer fitfully through her tiny, scraped hole in the paint. “I don’t see any motorcycles.” 

“Well, hell.” He frowned in his turn as he eyed the bar through his driving slit. “Wonder where the bloody hell they’ve all gone to?” His eyes roamed the block. “Obviously made the area their haunt. Look at the sodding place.”

Buffy sighed and nodded, trying not to notice too much of the devastation. Not that this was the best part of town in the first place. None of this down here by the tracks really was, but it would still need repairs. The whole town would; like some kind of ‘declare a disaster’ type deal. “Yeah.”

“Hey. Luv. That bit about ‘when the sheriff’s out of town…’ Remember… That’s why you have support staff. And even sheriffs get bloody vacation days.” He made a scoffing noise. “And, most sheriffs are elected, and run for the position; they aren’t forced into it by a bleedin’ birthright.”

Buffy nodded, gaze directed into her hands. “Makes sense. It’s a lot of damn work, being the sheriff.”

A hand hovered just next to her thigh. “Need some help with that, Slayer?”

Buffy’s head jerked up, and she eyed him in startlement. “Are you volunteering to be my deputy?”

He smiled slow and rapt, and lightly brushed her fingers with his. “Means I’d get to hit things,” he reminded her cheerfully, and nodded out the window. “Startin’ here, huh?”

Sometimes she could swear her heart might jump right out of her chest and do a little dance, complete with a brass band, when he said insane crap like that. He was nuts. And he was really, really good at making people fall in love with him.

Grabbing up the motel’s singed, sewer-stained blanket, she shoved it at him, afraid if she talked too much she’d do something really embarrassing, like cry. “Let’s get out there and see if Willy’s still inside. Maybe he can tell us what they’re up to. And besides;  _ God _ , it’s hot in here.”  
  
Spike had the grace to look remorseful as he tugged the strip of cheap, beige fuzz over his head. “Sorry, luv. No air-conditioning back when this baby rolled off the line.”  
  
“Remind me never to hitch a ride from you in the summer. I’d die.” The stuffy interior was bad enough, all closed up in the middle of a sixty-degree winter, with just her breathing inside. “I’d end up rolling down at least the back windows just to survive, and then a stray sunbeam would slide through when we went around a curve, and you’d go up in smoke…”  
  
Spike grinned at her and seized his blanket. “You plannin’ any long drives with me that far ahead, is it, pet?”  
  
Did he have to look so insanely triumphant over basically everything she said? “Maybe,” she teased, and slipped out of the passenger side with as much silent grace as she could manage in a zillion-year-old vehicle.  
  
They met with no one as they sidled along in the incredibly sparse shade cast by the warehouse. It was around noon by now, the sun high in the sky and hanging just a little south-of-west in the sky above, which meant there was just the tiniest sliver of shadow approximately two feet wide, narrowing to maybe a foot down by the end of the building, here along the eastern eave of the large structure. It meant they could creep along till they got to the part of the northern side that was shaded by old, corrugated tin covering a bunch of barrels, and then…   
  
Well, then they would be behind the bar, and hopefully if the bikers had left a lookout there weren’t many, because it would be mostly on Buffy to take them out until Spike got into the shade. Luckily, her backup was a vampire who had made it a sort of habitual extreme sport to play chicken with the big bright ball in the sky, the dope, so he wasn’t freaking out right now. He was just jogging along behind her with his blankie over his eyes like some kind of cheap, khaki nun, looking mildly uncomfortable but not really all that fazed. /Thank God we stopped for your coat./ That thing was just as much life-saving anti-sun prophylactic for him as it was emotional armor.  
  
“Probably aren’t any of ‘em still here, luv,” Spike informed her quietly as they paused in the last of the shade prior to making their dash across the blazing death-gauntlet that was the alley.   
  
“Huh?” Buffy asked, eyes studying the back door of the bar. There was a chain-link yard of sorts back there, filled with butt-cans and a few overturned tables. The gate was open, though, so they could get in quick, kick down the door if they needed to, case the place…  
  
“Never known ‘em to go anywhere without their motorbikes. An’ any road, they’re not the sort as leaves guards. Not a military unit, staking turf. They rove about like a pack of wild dogs. Move together to the next kill. If they need to retake ground, they do.”   
The apex predator deep inside of her accepted this explanation as sound, if sloppy. But then, Slayers were territorial, and fought for a place, a slice of ground and a group of people, a collection of homes and a sense of landed identity. The idea of just wandering around like that, rootless and peripatetic, felt horribly boundless and open-ended; like a stick figure perpetually at the verge of falling off a cliff, or a phrase with one end hanging out of parentheses, or that feeling when someone just cleared his throat and was looking at you, but never, ever said anything, for the rest of your life, and you always, always wondered what it would have been. /I’m made for here. I’m made for this. I don’t know how to do anything else but guard and protect./   
  
Well, there was someone inside that building she was meant to protect; and if he wasn’t in there, there might at least be some information about the creatures who were currently savaging the place that had been put into her hands. “Okay. Let’s do this.”  
  
They made their dash, Spike trailing his blanket-cape and little contrails of smoke as they crossed the fifteen feet or so of graying tarmac and careened through the gap in the shivering chain link. Spike kept going once they passed the gate, to collide with the side of the building in a brief, panting, controlled  _ thud _ . He immediately stripped off the smoldering wreck of the blanket to stomp on it, putting out the embers developing there. “Midday’s murder.”   
  
At this rate there was not going to be enough of the thing left to give it back to the motel. Oh well. Buffy would cry for that jerk at the desk tomorrow. “You smell anyone?”  
  
“Over charred nylon?”   
  
Buffy lifted her brows impatiently. /Slayer mode. Not in the mood./   
  
Gifting her with a look reserved for when he thought she was being a spoilsport, Spike turned away from the remains of his shroud and nudged the back door with his foot. It wasn’t latched, and slipped ajar without a creak to reveal a dim interior. He took a short whiff of the airlocked atmosphere, shrugged. “Full of their spoor, but it doesn’t smell hot.”   
  
/Ugh, but useful./    
  
And people wondered why she wanted a vampire to be her partner instead of her enemy. /Seriously. Look no further, you guys. Talk about the many ways I can avoid walking blindly into traps anymore!/ “Anything else?”   
  
His mouth twisted grimly. “Think Willy’s still in there.”   
  
His expression didn’t promise good things. “Alive?”   
  
“Doesn’t smell dead.”   
  
Why she felt such great consolation over a lack of dead Willy was beyond her. It wasn’t like she was super attached to the greasy little guy or anything, but… /Well, I suppose he is kind of a fixture in my world./ “That’s a relief, I guess.”   
  
Spike shrugged, and his eyes met hers. “Nothing else, I think.”   
  
Relaxing, she nodded and gave him a questioning look.    
  
“Oh, no, ladies first.”  
  
That earned him an eyeroll. “Now the chivalry comes back,” she snarked drolly.   
  
“Slayer’s prerogative.”   
  
Shaking her head, Buffy pushed her way into the low light of the bar’s back room. “Just don’t say I didn’t give you first shot next time when we run into the jerks…”   
  
He followed her in. “Who aren’t even here…”   
  
“Since I know you’re dying to hit ‘em… What the heck is this room for?” There was, like, a table and a bunch of small cages around the edges.   
  
“Poker.”   
  
Turning around in a circle to eye the weird arrangement, Buffy opened her mouth to demand an explanation… and halted as one came to mind. “Cats?”   
  
“Kittens, luv. Adult cats aren’t nearly as tasty; or so I’m told.”   
  
Buffy shuddered in her most picturesque possible way. “If I ever hear about you taking part in some gross-ass, kitten-eating card-game I am so not having sex with you…”   
  
Spike’s voice blossomed to something utterly triumphant. “We negotiating sex already? Didn’t know we were there yet, but I think telling a man he can’t play cards is a pretty steep price for nookie…”   
  
Caught out, Buffy exhaled hard through her nose and avoided his eyes to stare at approximately his chin. “You’re infuriating.”   
  
His stern expression devolved into another grin. “How about I bring you one home?”   
  
“Oh God. I so don’t need a kitten. And stop looking so smug. You’re the one who has to walk around in that… that  _ coat _ looking all… like you  _ look _ …” /It should be disgusting, that coat. How does he even  _ do _ that?/ But she had even given up telling herself that much by this point. It was his now, not…

Well. It was his. And that was the problem.   
  
His grin broadened into something dangerous. “Now we know why I really needed it back. Soddin’ thing is magical.”   
  
“Oh shut up.”   
  
“Makes for a fine cushion, too, in a pinch. ‘Magine it’d work right nice on soft grass after a hard, fast slay, say, between a couple of tombstones, under the moon…”   
  
Spinning away, Buffy strode for the inside door, skin alight and things underneath it prickling like she was made of shining, fizzing carbonation. /Sweet-talker./   
  
She came to an abrupt halt on the far side of the door, so fast Spike actually careened into her back, as the horrifying visual struck her eyes.   
  
The bar was a shambles. Every chair, every stool, was overturned, except for one. The few tables from the middle of the floor were broken in half or overturned. One stool had been shoved through a wall, another was stabbed into the red vinyl of one of the four booths. The other three booths were sliced open and had cracked Formica, or were covered in blood and spilled alcohol. The bodies of at least seven demons lay on the floor in various states of dismemberment, most of them already starting to rot and all of them species Buffy had previously tagged in her mental rolodex as pretty damned inoffensive as far as that went. At least, none of them had ever caused her any trouble in the years she had been in town. The ancient juke box over there to one side was shattered. So were the mirrors behind the bar.    
  
And Willy the snitch hung in front of them, spread-eagled like some kind of crucifixion, pinned to the the booze shelves behind his own bar… and didn’t move.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
* **mon petit boudin**: per my researches (which involved the internet and are therefore suspect), French insults involving blood sausage tend to indicate that a woman is being called old, ugly, or a whore; possibly all three. To be fair, though, this was not checked with any real human.  
  
We'll check in with Willy next week!  
  
  



	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaand... Time to get some play against those damned Hellions. Ready to start somethin'?  
(Many thanks, as always, to my betas, for being amazing!)

The room smelled like urine. Old urine and new. Blood too; demon, human, along with spilled, stale booze… but mostly it smelled like pee. Which was understandable, because it looked like Willy had basically been up there since… Since the beginning, and… /Oh, God…/

“Let’s get him down, pet.” Even Spike sounded bleak.

Buffy didn’t trust herself to speak as she followed her grim vampire around the bar. 

It took a lot of work to accomplish the task. Willy was pinned up there by no less than three huge knives and every dart in the bar. There were also shards of glass embedded in his arm, his leg, his left hand. A lot to work around. 

His head hung low, dangling between his shoulders so that they couldn’t see his face, and he was covered with unmentionables and blood, and the sour stench of fear-sweat.

He didn’t acknowledge their presence except to flinch a little and make the occasional low moan when they tugged out a sliver of glass, or when they got a limb loose and worked it for him. Eventually, though, they got him all the way down, dragged him limply around from behind the bar and over to the nearest booth, slid him onto the thin padding of the bench behind the askew table. He lay back soundlessly then, bleeding arm thrown over his eyes, lank hair sticking to the dried sweat on his forehead in greasy clumps. He was pale, and there was a continuous, visible shudder running through his body that made Buffy’s heart clench. She had never much liked Willy, thought he was kind of a waste of space, being so friendly with demons, but now she got it, the middle ground he had tried to occupy, and… /And it’s my job to keep it from biting him on the butt like this, just as much as it is my job to protect the people who have stores down on Main, or…/ 

She looked around the devastated bar, marked with Hellion depredations, the bodies everywhere a stark accusation. /I could’ve protected  _ them _ , too. They’re… not used to fighting. They’re not warriors. Not like… Spike, or a Trinik, or a…/

“Slayer. Stop.”

She shook her head, throwing off the rough absolution Spike was attempting to shove into her hands. “No. It’s not okay. I should’ve realized they’d come. I should’ve… I could’ve left you safe in there and come out and had a look, or…” Her hand drifted down to her pocket again, where her deadened beeper sat, a silent accusation. “I can’t ever forget…”

“Dammit, Buffy…”

“Not your fault.”

Willy’s creaky, dry voice made her jump, it was so unexpected. Buffy swung around to stare, amazed that the guy could even talk, he was so beat up and broken. “What? God, are you okay?”

That earned her a laugh; a low, faint, parched rasp of a dark chuckle. Then there was a flypaper sound of dry lips parting, and… “Any… water around? Haven’t had any since last night when they…”

“Oh. Yeah. Sure.” Spinning on his heel, Spike headed away. Buffy watched him as he passed one end of the bar, stared briefly down at something broken on the floor; just a mass of glittering glass shards. A former water dispenser? A series of familiar curses floated across the wrecked room as he dodged underneath the bar, came up with a beer mug that looked sound, and vanished through a side door that presumably led to one of the bathrooms, though it wasn’t labeled. Buffy wondered why he hadn’t just used the tap behind the bar, turned to glance at it… and frowned. /Okay, that’s disgusting./

It looked like someone had peed in it. And maybe beaten someone’s head in on the faucet, because there was what looked like super-dark urine standing in the basin and blood-spatter all over everywhere else. Not to mention that the faucet was bent over on itself in a way that suggested that even if you wanted to use it, probably not much water pressure would escape the end of the thing, so…

“These guys really did a number on your place,” Buffy murmured, feeling doubly remorseful. God, Willy had lost his livelihood too. Just another big old steaming hunk of blame to lay at her feet.

Spike was back, stepping over a body or two to hold out the mug. Buffy helped him tug Willy into a semi-reclining position. The bar-owner winced a lot at the pulling on his arms and shoulders. So did Buffy, for the record, as fresh blood bloomed on his t-shirt sleeve to pool in his armpit. She glanced at Spike, whose face remained stony and unmoved as they got the man propped against the wall. Buffy held the cup for him, and he drank down the tepid tap water like it was Crystal Springs. 

“Bloody hell, man, take it slow or you’re like to puke all over us.”

Willy gagged, nodded slightly, slowed himself with obvious effort. Gagged again, and lifted his face away from the cup Buffy held. Watery eyes rose to meet hers, earnest and with more seriousness in them than she had seen there since the business with Angel and the cage. “Not…” Cough. “…Your fault, okay kid? These guys…” A little twitch of the hand, as if he wanted to wave it around the room. “Been here before. Before your time. Mayor threw ‘em out. Always wanted to come back, okay? You’re allowed to have…” Gag. “…A life. Doin’ the best you can. Big job. Need more help. A little advice, a little more backup. Guys like these…” A jerk of the head. “Can’t predict…” 

Turning his head abruptly, he puked all over the Formica table.

Eventually they got a vomit-covered, dry-heaving Willy to keep down some water in smaller increments. He even started making sense again. “Willy,” Buffy asked him urgently, “you know I need to stop them. Did they say where they were going?”

“God, Slayer, listen. You’d need more bazookas, or a tank or some damn thing. The whole damn bunch of ‘em went…” He winced, looking abruptly scared.

_ “Where _ , Willy?”

“Okay, it so wasn’t my idea, you know? But they decided they were gonna throw down against those weird military types that’re showin’ up all over town; you know, the ones that keep nabbing everyone? I guess a couple of Razor’s boys ran into ‘em downtown, so they all went peeling out of here about twenty minutes ago to go to war or whatever…”

“Wait. They’re headed  _ downtown?” _

Nod.

/Well, shit./

“And their leader’s called  _ Razor?” _

Willy’s fingers flirted with the bottom of his shirt. Buffy was stunned for a moment when he started to lift it, thinking inanely that he was about to strip or something, till the edges of a long set of four parallel slices became visible; trailing up from the bottom right of his stomach to the top left. 

One of them had almost ripped off his nipple. Holy wow. No wonder his shirt was so bloody.

“Don’t let him get a grip on you,” Willy whispered. “Fucker’s like Wolverine.”

/Okay, sure./

“Comic book character. Never mind.”

“Okay, seriously; is every single guy ever in the entire universe a big giant nerd at heart?”

A faint smile touched Willy’s lips before it slipped away in exhaustion. “You’d be amazed how many chicks dig comics, too.” His head lolled a little. “Had a girlfriend once… Called her Kitty Pryde… So hot… Collected swords… Could kick my ass…”

He was delusional from pain.

Spike was grinning, though. “Sounds like a helluva woman, Willy.” Chuckling, he set aside the mug he’d taken from Buffy. “Lay your head a mo’, yeah? Gotta talk to the Slayer.” And he gave Buffy’s arm a tug.

Willy didn’t answer as she rose to join Spike a little ways away, just lay there with his eyes closed, looking half-asleep. “Is he gonna be okay?”

“Eventually,” Spike answered. “He’s human enough it’ll take him a bit.” He flickered her a tiny, conspiratorial glance, though his eyes were tight and he seemed oddly distracted. “Can’t fix him up with blood, for instance…”

“Yeah, well, not everyone’s as easy as vamps.”

“We’re a superior race, it’s true.”

“Smug bastard.”

“Got my reasons.” His expression altered to something fierce, then, edged with anguish. She jumped when, out of nowhere he swung to punch the nearest damaged booth-back, hard, with his left fist. It went right through the padding, through the cheap plywood behind the vinyl and stuffing, and got stuck in the far side. “Guess the soddin’ men in black beat us to the punch, luv.”

Spike had been so damn stoic this entire time, Buffy had forgotten how badly he must want to close with his tormentors, tear them limb from limb, have final closure of the entire situation. Seeing Willy like this had apparently only made it worse. Buffy had no idea if Spike really cared all that much about Willy as anything more than an acquaintance who served him booze (and blood, if he could afford it), but he was a fixed feature in the demon landscape around here, and therefore a symbol, right now, of all that was wrong in SunnyD. “Hey.” 

“Bugger.” He yanked a couple of times on his trapped arm, looking both shamefaced and pissed off.

“Hey,” Buffy said again, and laid a hand on his arm. It was trembling with suppressed wrath; with the energy her blood had lent him, as-yet-unspent, and the furious need to act. “We’ll figure it out. We’ll get ‘em.”

Spike turned his eyes on her, over his shoulder. His teeth were a rictus. “Need to kill something, Buffy.”

She squeezed his arm. “I get that.” She was feeling a kind of a way herself. Every time she looked at Willy, she wanted to rip the whole town apart to get to the bastards, then tear them in half and make them eat the pieces. /Dammit, this is  _ my _ town, how can they just  _ dare _ to come up in here and…/

And she realized, belatedly, Spike probably felt the same way. /You’re the oldest vamp here, aren’t you? By far. Which means… vamp-wise… you’re Master, here. By demon rules, this is, like,  _ your _ town, isn’t it? Just as much as it’s mine? And you were trying to take it back when you… With the Gem?/

God, no wonder they fought so much, before. And no wonder he’d felt so… emasculated, by the commandos. He couldn’t even do his… Like, his Master-vamp job right now and get the other demons to take him seriously. Or, at least, he couldn’t till now. /But you’re gonna. You’re gonna get your own back, starting today. And then… Holy shit, we’re gonna make an amazing team, running this town together./ The idea of working  _ with _ a town’s Master vamp instead of against him sounded… /Talk about pooling instead of wasting your resources!/

With a long, sharp inhale, Spike settled himself, yanked out his arm. Ignored his scraped-up fist to turn resolutely back. “Gotta get him outta here. In case any of the bastards come back. Then… What do you think the odds are of us rescuing any of the plan?”

Buffy gave it due consideration. “I think we should still give it a try. I’m not a huge fan at all of the Hellions and those commando guys having a war in the middle of our town. Are you?”

Spike shot her a startled look, tilted his head slightly. “Could cause trouble. On the other hand, maybe the prick’s’ll take each other out…”

Buffy honestly hadn’t thought of that. “Well, let’s get eyes on the situation first, go from there.”

“Definitely don’t wanna get too close to those soldier-boys an’ risk ‘em seein’ me till they’re busy,” her vamp muttered.

She could understand his concern there. “We’ll stay low.”

“I’d appreciate it, luv.” Swinging away, he headed back over to where Willy lay in his post-rescue stupor. “Alright, Willy. Here’s the thing. Slayer and I have to go deal with these bastards. Need to get you out of it first, though.” His voice had a strange, gentle note in it as he spoke, startling Buffy. It took her a second to realize why he was being so good to the bar-owner. /The victim of my torturer is my friend, or something./ He and Willy had shared something, now. It was making Spike go carefully. “You have anywhere safe to go?” 

Willy shuddered and answered without opening his eyes. “Live in the back. Find me.”

“Bollocks to that.” Spike turned to stalk away. 

Buffy watched him go in surprise. “Where’re you headed?” 

“Poor sod needs somethin’ else to wear, an’ then we’re sendin’ him to Clem. No one’ll look for him there, an’ the worst that’ll happen to him is he’ll get overfed on bloody snack food and forced to play Parcheesi till he recovers…”

Willy groaned. It seemed Parcheesi was a fate worse than torture by insane demon-biker. 

Within about fifteen minutes Spike had Willy up and over in the Little Demons room, probably hosing him off in the sink or something and throwing jeans at him. Buffy left them to it and headed into the little apartment in the back to call Giles. “Hey. Are you guys done?”

‘Just finishing. You?’ 

“More or less. We need you to come down to Willy’s and get him, bring him to a safehouse we know about. He’s in bad shape. He’s been a hostage all this time, and the Hellions basically turned him into a pincushion…”

‘Good Lord. Shouldn’t he go to hospital?’

Buffy turned her head toward the bathroom door, heard the low voices coming from within; the occasional low, Spike-voiced curse, a high-pitched protest from Willy, something soothing in an even lower rumble. “I think he’ll live, but he’s scared to death they’ll come back and find him, and his apartment is attached to the bar, so…”

‘Very well. Where is this safehouse, then?’

Buffy held her breath briefly. /Here goes./ “This Loose-Skinned demon Spike knows, named Clem. He lives up by the freeway, sort of, off of twelfth, in this old silent film production place. Willy should be safe with him as long as he doesn’t knock over any old film cans and blow himself up…”

‘Oh good Lord…’

“And Clem’ll make sure he gets fed and watered. The guy seems like the biggest mother hen ever. They’ll probably spend most of their time watching TV and playing Yahtzee…”

‘I’d imagine he’d provide an excellent meal for the demon, as well, with all the emotions he’s currently experiencing. A Loose-Skinned would provide him some relief, even, so it ought to be quite a therapeutic trade…’

“Emotions?”

‘Yes, Buffy. That’s what Loose-Skinned demons feed from; the emotions around them. No doubt that’s Spike’s intention; to provide Willy both physical safety and emotional relief. I’d never have thought it of a vampire, but it’s quite an empathetic solution. I’ll be along shortly.’

Buffy sighed as she cradled Willy’s old, red banana phone. Held her hand over the receiver for a moment as if for stability and wondered just how many types of actually beneficial demons there were out there that her Watcher had just never bothered to tell her about. /It sure would have changed my whole worldview like woah to know that there were nice, useful, friendly demons running around, alongside all the nasty ones. Or is that not Council-approved, to screw with the Slayer’s murderous perceptions by telling her about all the sweetie-pie demons in the world?/

Buffy kind of doubted it was, considering that it totally and completely wrecked, like, basically the entire Council-authorized definition of the word ‘demon’ as she had been taught to classify it, though no doubt their excuse would be something along the lines of ‘if they’re not dangerous, you don’t need to know about ‘em’. 

What she had learned from that omission had only recently come under challenge from the referees. /‘Demon’ can’t mean ‘unequivocally evil’ and ‘automatically murder-worthy’ if there are all these hazy exceptions all over the place, can it?/

Holy fuck, she was angry.

And crap, she had just cracked Willy’s phone. Like she hadn’t done him enough damage. 

Downstairs, Spike was pacing, and finally smoking. He had Willy laid out in another booth, looking a lot less like death warmed over in a clean tee and jeans. The bartender looked exhausted and pale where he lay with his eyes closed, motionless with his arms pressed against stuffing and ripped vinyl; a still contrast to Spike’s galvanic, emotive presence stalking the floor from one end of the room to the other, kicking aside bodies and puffing like a steam train. 

“You okay?”

“I’m thinking.”

“I see that,” Buffy answered wryly. Drew closer, leaned against the nearest dented pillar between two booths. Waited, and watched her vampire’s restless form as he prowled through the room; as he finished one cigarette—the last of the two he’d borrowed back at the motel—found another loose pack by rifling one of the bodies, dragged out the three cigarettes remaining in there, muttered something about menthol, plugged his mouth again. 

He looked like a very slim, very pale, leather-shrouded dragon, poking into and around the bar, tipping up empty bottles to eye their contents, prodding over stools and into askew cupboards like some sort of restless, caged panther. Something inside Buffy just tangled up and flopped over and twisted and went all spazzy, watching him; a part of her that understood him, felt kinship, and knew the only fix for his problem would come with action. /He’s like me. Being trapped is…/

He had been still for far too long lately—caged in a commando cell, chained in a bathtub, secured to a chair, tied down in a small apartment, then stuck in a motel bed—torment for a creature of impulse meant always to be in motion. And on top of that—on top of his normal, insane demonic urgency and the pent-up, nervous energy of the last couple of weeks, he had had her blood, was roaring with everything she had given him. He was a ball of potential energy awaiting a trigger to set him off. Then, he would explode.

/I understand you. The same way you understand me. The way no one else…/

It caught in her throat, made her ache. And yet… He was a quicksilver creature of impulse in a way that she could never be. He never held back. He said what he meant. He told it like it was, spoke up about what he saw. He didn’t hide his feelings, and he didn’t pretend. 

The tangled, flopping thing inside her spasmed… and toppled off of some sort of high, desperate cliff. And she had to fight the tears that wanted to leap to her eyes, because… /He says what he means, yeah, but also he doesn’t waste time. And when he’s done with something…/

Buffy got the feeling Spike had been a kind of vagabond all his existence; just wandering from one city to another, seeking stimulation; a new thrill, a new set of experiences. What if she was wrong about his wanting to maybe run the city with her? What if he got bored, staying here in the dullsville backwater that was Sunnydale, hellmouth or no hellmouth? What if, after a while, he decided being with her wasn’t enough to make it worth giving up his exciting life of traveling around doing the vamp thing, and he just… left one day, no matter what he said? What if she just woke up one morning and found a letter on her pillow that said, ‘Sorry, luv. Couldn’t take it anymore. Had to see the world. I’ll pop back in again next time I’m in town. S.’ 

Like Angel. 

He must have seen something on her face as he made one of his circuits, for he came to an abrupt halt and stalked right up into her face. “Alright, what are you thinking, Slayer?”

She looked away. “I just want to get this done.”

“Oh, bloody hell no.” Catching her chin with his fingers, he yanked her head up, forced her to meet his eyes. “Somethin’s got you all twisted up and runnin’ scared. Somethin’ ‘bout me. What is it?”

He’d laugh at her. He’d… He’d probably get pissed off that she’d question him, but… 

But it was her greatest fear. “What if you get bored?”

Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. “Bored?”

“With me,” she elaborated, and cut her eyes away. “With being stuck here. I can’t leave, but you… You were used to being free. You didn’t come here to be Sunnydale’s Master. I mean, I know you have it by default, but it’s… It’s a lot, and you didn’t ask for it, and I don’t even know what that, like, entails, but you got impatient even putting up with Harmony, much less… And I’m… I mean… I’m no picnic, and what if…”

“Oh, Christ.” And she was wrapped up tight in strong arms; strong as her own. Could cling hard, without breaking anything, and god, she had missed being able to just let go and… Except this time she could reach all the way around and lock on tight and feel solid and whole and… “You’re barmy, you are. You know that, Buffy? How the bloody hell could a man ever get bored of you? You’re a conundrum every sodding second; never know what to make of you. Half the time you have me at sixes and sevens…”

“Whatever that means,” she sniffled, was horrified to find out she was crying a little. There was nowhere further to fall. Nowhere further, because the cliff was way up there, and…

“Hush. Silly chit. Tellin’ yourself mad stories. Told you. Couldn’t chase me away with fire. I don’t have a bleedin’ clue how to leave you. Would do anything. Anything you need. Manage idiot fledges, though I hope like hell you don’t ask me to. I’d as soon just help you stake ‘em, as I have bugger all patience for the tossers. Help you scare the rest of these pillocks into line; no problem. Can do that a lot easier now I can help you beat on the fools. And as to being bored of the town…” He gave a little shrug she felt under her hands, where she burrowed under the shell of his second skin of leather. “Sure, it’s no Paris, but with a soddin’ apocalypse poppin’ off every Tuesday, there’s no  _ time _ to get bored, yeah?”

Buffy closed her eyes, very briefly, against his neck. “I’m sorry. I guess that’s just my major trauma.”

“I know it, pet.”

“I don’t mean to put it on you.”

“Know that too. You have to learn to trust it with your heart, not just your head.”

She nodded, dropped her forehead to his throat. Breathed a little. “What if you decide I’m too much like Harmony when you meet Mr. Gordo?”

“When I what?” he demanded, startled, and pulled away.

“My stuffed pig. He lives with me, on my bed. If you have to share bedspace with a stuffed pig, are you out?”

He gaped at her, looking more stunned than she had ever seen him. 

“I mean, I know how you feel about pigs…”

To her recovering equilibrium and growing amusement, he buried his face in one palm, and his shoulders began to shake with laughter. “Where’s this pig, then? At your dorm, or at your mum’s?”

“Dorm.”

“Then I’ll just have to be sure to shag you at Joyce’s, where the pig can’t watch.”

“Oh God…”

“I always wondered if you two would ever hit it…”

Buffy whirled, startled, at the weak observation from the booth two over. “You  _ what?” _

Willy still had his eyes shut, hadn’t moved where he lay like a veal on his bench. “Have some money coming my way now.” He nodded blindly in their general direction, a faint smile touching his cracked lips. “Gotta collect. One-eyed Tuki owes me a Benjamin. A bill from Eglaf too, and a dub from Carni. Even Duna wanted in, but she only put in a dime. Tuki was on your side, Slayer. She said no way you two would ever go there. I said after that twat Angel I was pretty sure the door was open, and maybe Spike wasn’t exactly your type, but if he just hung around long enough he might get convincing. Just, maybe you might have to smack him around a little first to show him who’s on top…”

Buffy stared open-mouthed, pretty sure she was going to spontaneously combust. /They’re taking  _ bets? _ On whether I… Whether Spike and I…/ “How… We… No one ever even saw us around each other except when we were  _ fighting!” _

Willy still didn’t open his eyes or really react much, except to smile a little. “He’s not blowin’ in the wind, is he, kid? And you helped her, huh, Spike? Against your own family. That says somethin’, in the vamp world…” 

“You don’t know my family,” Spike answered, sounding, of all things, amused.  _ Amused! _

“Yeah, well. Figured it was worth a gamble. Figured, maybe you two had the hots for each other.”

Buffy couldn’t look at either of them. She would never look at Willy  _ again _ . And had Spike  _ heard _ about this? Did he  _ know? _

“Hell, Willy, you coulda let me in on the action. I coulda made me and some of the guys double their money…”

Buffy punched him, hard, on the arm she hadn’t hit yet.

“Ow! Hell, luv, I woulda bought you something right nice with it!”

“Okay, we’re going to have to work on your idea of romance.”

Spike grinned at her. “Thought you’d rather have something I earned honest, than ‘f I’d gone out and nicked you a gift.”

“You want to buy me a gift.” Her disbelief was plain.

Spike shrugged nonchalantly. “Yeah, well, know you like jewelry…” He waggled his brows at her. “Preferably not with skulls on it…”

Buffy felt her flush come roaring back like clockwork, abruptly keenly aware that she had never given him back his ring. /Eee./ Was he fishing about that? “No one expects skulls,” she managed evenly. “Except, you know, goths.”

He snorted at that and caught her hand. Lifted it, kissed her knuckles in a gesture she found profoundly affecting. It calmed her, strangely. “Maybe a necklace,” he murmured, and reached out to trace her throat with two fingers. “One that won’t burn me.”

Shivering at his touch, Buffy glanced down, and blushed at the tiny cross that hung low in the valley between her breasts, worn most recently as an unconscious prophylactic against the all-too-attractive vampire to whom she had been engaged a few short days ago. He had been protected by her tee, but if it ever slipped out… /I’m out of the habit. The ‘protect the vamp I’m dating’ habit. ‘Don’t wear crosses except when patrolling. Don’t carry holy water in places where the bottle could burst if you’re hugging too tight. Don’t…’/ “Sorry. I completely forgot it was…”

“Occupational hazard, luv.” His fingers trailed up, cruised along the side of her neck, brushed like a feather under her jaw. “Bloody hell,” he whispered, “you’re so christing gorgeous, Buffy. Such a warrior…”

The front door slammed open, to the tune of a shocked exclamation. “Oh, bloody hell! What in the name of…” 

Buffy was already spinning, hand on stake and crouched, before her brain registered the voice as Giles’. “Oh. Okay. God.” /Breathing. Breathing is good./ Going from ‘all snuggly’ to ‘under attack’ like that couldn’t be good for the heart. 

Giles wasn’t looking at them at all. He was staring at the carnage around what had once been the most popular demon-haunt in Sunnydale, face pale and jaw set. It seemed even he found this sort of slaughter distasteful. 

Relaxing slowly, breathing again, Buffy straightened and, with a short, shaky exhale, called out, “Over here, Giles. Help us with Willy. He needs all hands on deck.”

Her Watcher’s eyes lifted from the bodies on the floor, blinked over to the booth, and sharpened. “Good Lord, what…”

“You… shoulda seen me before they cleaned me up,” Willy muttered. “You ever been a piñata?”

***

They got Willy dispatched off to Clem’s in Giles’ tiny Citroen, then did the danger-dance back toward the relative safety of the DeSoto, after which they sat for a long moment, Buffy gripping Spike’s thigh with her fingers. “Alright. You ready for this?” After all, they were about to head into a warzone now hosting two sets of combatants with a yen for capturing and torturing him. It wasn’t likely to be his favorite idea.

“You joking? Let’s go watch ‘em mow each other down.” He put the stuffy old car into drive, and they peeled out to roar off toward the center of town. 

They started to see signs of more recent Hellion depredations along about Mr. Donut. The Sun Cinema had not escaped unscathed (the quaint remnant of the old ticket-booth was shattered and bore the marks of fire); nor had the Sunnydale Mall (which was depressingly empty and had its share of broken windows out front, by the Sunset Grille and Pints N Quarts). 

Sunnydale looked like one of those cities you saw on TV. Like Bosnia or something. How had one tiny troop of demons done this much damage in one night, seriously? “Don’t they like to, you know,  _ enjoy _ a city at all, or just wreck it? Like, would it kill them to watch a movie or something? Try on some pants?”

Spike’s lips flattened as he overhanded his steering wheel hard to the left. “They’re a swarm, luv; armed with Molotov cocktails. Mob mentality. No reasoning with ‘em. Just gotta sweep ‘em out or do ‘em in.” As the car straightened out he covered her hand with his, briefly. “Hence the weapon.”

“Right. Wasp-spray.” She flattened her own lips. “First we have to go fishing, though.”

“Well, we keep following the trail, we’ll find a nice, shady hole to set our lure.”

Buffy watched him for a moment, wondering, then… “That sounded suspiciously like you knew what you were talking about. Was that predatory vamp-talk, or are you going to tell me you’ve actually gone fishing?”

Spike scoffed. “Not since I was brought into this fine new life of mine, Buffy,” he answered blandly. “Don’t eat fish now, do I?” 

She lifted her brows.

He sighed heavily. “Was a bit of a brook below our home when I was a wee lad. Wouldn’t quite call it a country estate, but it was something like, bein’ outside the city. Manchester,” he elaborated with a flash of blue eyes, and was back to staring at the road through his thin, sunny slit. “Used to try my damndest to catch summat, but of course I always came home with bugger-all to show for it. Mum and Cook were kind to me, always patted me on the head and said I mustn’t stop trying, so I went on giving it a go; every Sunday. Shad, perch dartin’ below, sun dapplin’ the water. Perfect spot to think about how beautiful the world is, try to find the right words for it all… But never did catch a bloody thing.” He shrugged then, and his voice, gone dreamy, snapping back into focus. “Never did a damned thing well with my hands till I was turned. Demon gave me that.”

Buffy realized she was staring, mouth hanging open, and reeled her jaw shut with an effort. /Country  _ estate? _ Who  _ are _ you?/ 

It wouldn’t do to ask, though. If she did, he’d never speak up again, so she simply nodded and said, neutrally, “Sounds like a nice memory.”

He glanced swiftly over again, eyes narrowed, as if seeking for judgment. When none appeared he relaxed visibly, nodded just as neutrally. “Another life, of course, but… Hopefully this fishing expedition will bear more fruit.”

“Or, you know, demon.” Buffy leaned forward abruptly, heart racing, having caught a glimpse through her tiny viewing-hole, of a motorcycle whizzing past them, way ahead, through an intersection up by the Espresso Pump. “Low-hanging, ripe demon-fruit.” They  _ better _ not have hurt the Espresso Pump or she was so going to just destroy them all. They wouldn’t need any special weapon. No siree bob. None at all. 

Spike grimaced and hit the gas to follow the vanishing sound of motorcycle engine. Slowed again when they both realized they’d lost the Hellion in the distance. “Buffy, if you love me, you won’t ever say anything like that again.”

Buffy hesitated, but what it came down to was, did she trust him to stay? 

And the answer was, very softly, “Guess I better not, then.” She could even breathe when she said it. 

The car bumped slowly to a stop, right in the middle of the street. Spike sat there for a moment, just gripping the steering wheel, then turned to her, ponderously, lowered his head, and buried his face in her neck, his fingers gripping her waist. 

/Oh, wow./ “Probably I’ll keep falling harder pretty much every day, the more you keep being all sexy and wonderful and badass and Captain Loyal, and with the sneaky, hidden squishy moments,” Buffy elaborated softly into his neck. “So, you know, keep that up, and you’re golden.”

His fingers flexed hard on her sides, and she heard his long, slow, ragged inhale. “Bloody hell, love,” he whispered, muffled into her neck, and it was a different ‘love’. Nothing casual about it, this time. 

Lifting her hand, she ran it up along the back of his neck. Teased at the still-soft curls that had escaped the mousse, there at his nape; gave them a gentle tug. Kissed the side-back of his head; what she could reach. “Also, whenever you’re ready for that, I hear you’re supposed to be really good in bed. Which I’m sure is a bonus. God knows I could stand to have a little of that by now, so by the time we get there, I’m sure I’ll be more than ready to jump on that train.” Another slow run of her fingers up his neck. “You know, when it’s not my blood convincing you it’s what you want.”

His head jerked up, and he stared at her. “You think…” he began incredulously, and then shook his head, eyes closed, as understanding perked through his features. When they opened again, the blue there was fierce, uncompromising. “I’m not broken, Buffy. Don’t want you because I’ve had your blood. And I don’t want you to… erase what happened to me, or even to reclaim something. I’ve been there, done that, and then some.” His shoulders jerked as if he were shaking off something distasteful. “I just want you, full-stop. Have done, for ages now.” Reaching up, he touched her cheek lightly with just the tips of his fingers, smiled that quiet, full smile she loved; the one no one else ever saw. “And sure. I’m probably gonna be a bit fucked up over that business for a while. Won’t promise it won’t come up, but…”

She wouldn’t flinch away. After all, she’d be amazed if it wouldn’t. “I’m strong enough, you know. If you come up swinging sometimes.”

He made a face, looked away. “Countin’ on it.” Discomfort etched his face for a moment, settled. “Hell,” he muttered then, sounding disgruntled. “Doesn’t feel right, bein’ this soft in the duster. Looks bad on me, pet.”

She couldn’t help it. She laughed. Gave him a shove back toward the steering wheel. “You have my permission to be all Spike-like again. I won’t hold it against you.”

Growling, he shifted the car back into gear, set a sneer carefully across his countenance. “Demons to fight. Soldiers to interrupt an’ the like. Best be off.”

“Right.”

“You ever tell anyone how soft I am underneath, Buffy, and I will drain you dry.”

She had never relinquished her finger-hold in his hair, kept her hand it there as he accelerated. “Wouldn’t dream of it. For one thing, I like having this part of you all to myself.”

***

They hid in the shady eaves of a pillared storefront a few blocks east of the Espresso Pump and two doors down from the hardware store, having tucked the DeSoto in the alley catty-corner to the Cupboard behind a newish bagel shop called ‘Tasty Holes’. Buffy was really sure with a name like that that it wasn’t going to last long, and did people remotely think things through when they named their stores?

Across the street, at least most of the Hellions were holed up in an alley between Lassiter’s Antiques and the bridal shop where Buffy had scared the tar out of Riley Finn a couple of days ago by gushing about her vampire fiancé. The mouth of the alley was clogged with them; leaning on their bikes, bent over, coughing, growling, milling around. They appeared to be in some kind of uproar. 

Buffy frowned as one of them reeled out of the alley, supported by another, straightened, bellowed something, ripped up one of the huge, metal trash cans bolted down to the sidewalk—thus tearing up half the concrete in the process—and launched it through the arched plate glass of Bea’s Brides. The wedding dresses in the window went down in a vast clatter of toppling mannequins and shattering and alarms. 

/Well, so much for that store./

Staggering away from the bridal shop, the teed-off Hellion held up its hand to ward off its buddy’s assistance, coughed, spat something oily onto the tattered sidewalk… and then keeled over on its face. 

“See it, luv?” Spike whispered urgently.

“See what?”

“They’re all over bullet holes. The bikes as well. Think they’ve already had a run-in with your commandos.”

Buffy reassessed the scene before her with fresh eyes. Now that Spike mentioned it, they really did look like a kicked anthill, didn’t they? “Well, I guess those soldiers are handy for something, huh?”

“Might’ve thinned the herd a bit,” Spike agreed blandly. “What do you think? I make there to be… twenty left?”

“Yeah. Still standing, at least.” They had a few bent over their motorcycles, or leaning against the walls of the alley, or sagging over their pals, but those ones might as well be kind of out of commission. “Why don’t we have machine guns, again?”

Spike shot her a look full of sidelong admiration. “Reckon one of those would just get in your way, Slayer. Saw how you dismantled the ones in the motel. Your whole soddin’ body is a lethal weapon.”

“Look who’s talking.”

Spike grunted. “Ta, luv. Though, a gun does have a certain straightforward charm to it.” His grim-face was back. “Kills clean and done, or so I’d think, but maybe not for tough bastards like these." He set himself. “Normally I’m not one for torture. Prefer a quick vengeance, but I wouldn’t mind a bit of gloating in this case. If these soldier-boys wanna punch ‘em full of holes and let ‘em suffer a bit… Not all that sad about it this time around.” 

Buffy wasn’t particularly regretful either as she eyed the damaged pack, seeking a mark. “There. That one; the bald one, hanging off to one side. He looks grab-able.”

Spike grunted. “Wounded, though. No good nabbing one as is about to kick off.”

“Okay, but look how close he is to the leader. Didn’t Willy say the one with the big metal claws is the leader?”

A short, assessing pause. “Got a point, Slayer. Recognize him, actually, though the bastard wasn’t the leader back then.” With a quick jerk of a nod, Spike straightened. “Alright, luv. How do you wanna play it, then?”

Buffy slipped her fingers down to play with his, waiting to see if he was receptive. After a beat he let her fingers intertwine with his, signaling acceptance. “Like we talked about. You play bait. When they rush you in the alley, I cut ‘em off, and you jump our guy. We pass him to Xander and Giles, we jump on the bike, Wil does her mojo…”

“Still dunno if I trust this spell. Witch made herself invisible, but that doesn’t mean she can do it to some other bloke…”

His grumbles sounded petty, but they were really there to cover up his discomfort. Being bait had actually been his idea—no way Buffy would ever in a million years have suggested it herself—but that didn’t mean he felt super glad about it. And, by the way, the trust he was putting in her—and by extension, her friends—to keep him out of the Hellions’ clawed hands once they started rushing out into the sun after him? 

Talk about weighty. 

Only maybe Wil had kind of an inkling, now that the plan was already in motion, of how incredibly, insanely brave Spike was being. Or foolhardy. Or just absolutely nutso dedicated to getting his vengeance and ridding the world of these guys. “She can do it,” Buffy promised softly. “As long as she’s touching us, she said. They race right by us, we never get out into the sun…”

Spike growled low in his throat. “Great fat load of ‘ifs’ in this plan, Slayer, just sayin’. What if the Boy didn’t get those chains an’ the lot from the hardware store, or Red doesn’t manage to keep her little hands on us and I end up skiddin’ out into the sun and goin’ up like a candle?”

Buffy beamed at him. “Never happen. I’ll throw myself on top of you to keep you out of the sun and roll you back into the shade.” 

She was answered with a groan. 

“Trust me. I save all of our plans with my Slayer-fast reflexes.”

“Bloody hell. How any of you have survived this long is beyond me.”

“Okay, you were totally Mr. Support-o Guy when we came up with it…”

“Buffy, in front of that lot I’d support you if you said the plan was to set me on fire… but right now I’ve begun to realize that might actually  _ be _ the plan.”

“Hey.” She squeezed his fingers, caught his eye.  _ “Trust _ me.”

He groaned at her. “You know I do.” Turned his scowl back on their mark. “Right, then. Got me covered?”

“From here till forever. You’re an investment.”

Okay, it was just way super fun to say stuff like that to him and watch him try to hold himself together. Like he was using the leather of the duster as a full-body band-aid to keep himself from completely disintegrating. 

The plan actually went, for a change, pretty close to perfectly. Buffy watched like a hawk while Spike stepped out into the last vestiges of shade across from the Hellions, faced them at the mouth of his own, shadowed alley, and shouted, “OI! HEAR YOU’VE BEEN LOOKIN’ FOR ME?”

Every demon-biker in town, including the half-dead ones, jerked up like marionettes, stared for about one second. Then, like he was in a movie, the leader with the claws hissed,  _ “Vampire,” _ in a voice that was audible across the whole width of the street, and swung onto his bike. 

/Wow. Theatrical, much?/

“Saddle up, boys, and lets get us some fresh meat! Vamp’s not much, but it’s better than nothin’!”

“Okay, he seriously talks like that?”

“Be ready, Slayer.”

As they came roaring across the median, crossed the point of no return, Spike yanked free the sword he’d been wearing strapped to hip and leg underneath his duster. They’d had some serious debate with the Scoobies over arming her vampire, but in the end Buffy had ended said debate with a sharp slice of her hand to cut off all further dispute. “If he’s going to be the worm on our hook, he’s going to be able to defend himself.  _ End of story.” _

The first two to enter the gaping maw of the alley were claw-boy and his bald, hunched-over sidekick, bleeder. Aka, the mark. /Excellent, excellent./ Even better, they were leading the pack by a good three feet. 

As such, Buffy took advantage of the natural lull and promptly swung around in between them and their buddies to plant herself in said alley opening, her own sword held at the ready. And started slashing front tires. 

_ “Take out the bikes,” _ Anya had said flatly.  _ “When I was human the first time around, the main reason mounted soldiers and mercenaries ran the world was because they were mounted, and everyone else was fighting on foot. Believe me, you don’t want the grief.”  _ And she’d shot Spike an oddly conspiratorial glance.  _ “For some reason I doubt the Hellions have developed a sense of chivalry in the last eighty years.” _

Spike had scoffed at that concept. Not that Buffy had blamed him.  _ “Because bikers are supposed to be all chivalrous anyway?” _

_ “I’ve met any number of bikers who are extremely chivalrous, actually. Very kind and conscientious men and women, many of them; but certainly not these ones.” _

_ “Done a lot of running around with bikers, have we, Ahn?” _

Anya had ignored Xander’s sour grapes. Buffy had as well, but for a different reason.  _ “Women? How can a woman be chivalrous? Isn’t that a guy thing?” _

Spike had muttered something into his hand behind her, while to her surprise, Giles had chimed in as well, murmuring something about ‘three years of French and still hasn’t learned a bloody thing’. Which, okay, had to save the world every night, was kind of busy?

Anya had taken up the lesson before Giles could do it, though.  _ “Do you know why chivalry was even invented? It didn’t start out as ‘being nice to women’. It wasn’t even about being noble or any of that. Most knights weren’t noble by birth, or at least not at first…” _

/Okay, they weren’t?/ Way to screw up someone’s girly little fantasies.

_ “...Most of them were little more than muscled boors hiring out to the closest nearby landowner in the hopes of having a steady job. What they had was a horse, a sword, a whole lot of sweaty muscle, and some small skill at lopping off people’s heads.” _ Anya, as always, had her straightforward, ‘history was mostly about icky men’ face on.  _ “The petty lord there would give them a couple of free meals a day, a place to stay—room and board literally came from a cot somewhere and a place to eat on the board, the table—and maybe a little ill-fitting armor if he could afford it. A leather jerkin or something. Scale-mail attached to it if they were lucky. But what they  _ did  _ have that most of the starved peasants and rioting mobs didn’t was a tall, trained, four-footed death-monster that kept them away from the sword or the pitchfork of some poor idiot on foot till he could get close, tromp them to death, and whack his head off.” _

_ “So you’re saying chivalry was just rules of engagement for old-school, elite soldiers with crap morals?” _ Xander had demanded, incredulous.

_ “To start off with, yes,” _ Anya had agreed, unsurprised by this outburst.  _ “They were necessary, after all. It didn’t matter if the infantry the other lord had assembled to fight back because the two lords had insulted each other, or wanted to take each other’s land or whatever, had pikes or something else with a long reach. You might have to sacrifice a few horses, but mostly they just rode right over the top of those poor idiots and won anyway.” _

/Oh./ Just like having a motorcycle. 

Anya’s discourse had engendered a swift memory of exactly what it had been like for Buffy to try to adapt her normal fighting techniques when she had first fought the two Hellions on Giles’ doorstep. She had never felt so wrong-footed in any fight before except when she had been sixteen and thralled, and certainly she had never been so easily bested by only a couple of adversaries; but they had been mounted and she afoot. Who knew that little difference could be such a tactical advantage? /Maybe I shouldn’t feel quite so guilty about letting Spike get taken, after all./ 

It also explained why it had been so much easier to take those jerks down in the motel. Clearly the Hellions were much more used to fighting from bike-back than afoot. /I took them apart once I had them off their bikes, but when they were mounted…/

_ “Till they stole gunpowder from the Chinese,”  _ Anya had informed them all stridently, _ “having a horse was like having a tank. You were invincible; just like being on a motorcycle can be now if you’re fighting on foot...”  _

/Yes, I get it. Thank you, Anya, for driving the message home./ 

_ “Chivalry was just the rules someone came up with for how to not tromp completely over everyone you came across because you had a horse, and it was meant to give these suddenly-given-a-title-and-lands mercenaries some idea of how not to be complete meatheads, and make them better masters when they were taking care of a bunch of peasants. Man, woman, child… they were suddenly responsible for a bunch of muddy, poor people’s wellbeing and had no clue what to do about it, but they couldn’t ride them down into the mud with their horses or they wouldn’t eat that night, so… chivalry.” _ She’d smiled at Spike, then, who had been grinning at this jocular summary, then shot a glare at Xander.  _ “Holding the door and having manners evolved later.” _

_ “Takes a while to learn to be a gentleman,” _ Spike had agreed.  _ “Generations, sometimes.” _

Xander had turned purple. 

_ “Meantime,” _ Spike had gone on blithely,  _ “rabble like this have no reason to develop chivalry, and no need for it. They _ want  _ to run over the folk they see.” _

_ “Exactly.” _ Anya had eyed Spike with enough interest to make Buffy bristle a little.  _ “Are you a gentleman, Spike?” _

_ “Only when the situation calls for it. Otherwise, I’ll thank you to quit insulting me, yeah? I’m a sodding  _ vampire, _ remember?” _

His half-irritated rebuttal had earned him a perky grin that had told Buffy to be wary of the thousand-year-old ex-demon, who clearly thought flirting with Spike would be an excellent pastime. 

Anya might just very well have designs on her vamp. Which, in other circumstances, sure. Buffy could see how they might suit each other pretty well, with the past history and the current sitch and all, but, just… no. 

Well, Anya’s crush on Spike would have to wait. Right now, Buffy had mounted warriors to deal with; ones equipped with zero chivalry. Which meant, dismount them, and fast.  _ “What you did with mounted men back in those days, pet,”  _ Spike had told her as they’d been working on their strategy, _ “was you hamstrung the bloody beasts…” _

_ “Oh, the poor  _ horses!” Willow had exclaimed, horrified.

_ “Brutal business, war. No one asked the poor soddin’ beasts did they wanna participate. But if it was the horses or you…”  _ Spike had shrugged.  _ “Least in this battle all we have to do is take out tires and not legs.” _

Ducking beneath a blow, Buffy swung at the leader’s tire, sliced it, rolled smoothly to the right, opened a second. Came up in a crouch with an upward swing to bleed a third, and dove hard away toward the far alley wall, fetching up on the sunny side, gasping, to watch the mayhem unfold. 

The lead three bikes were doing an extremely balletic atmospheric dance as their front tires deflated. The first bike was already vertical, back wheel rising over the top of the deflated, crunching chrome of the front as it skidded out on the refuse and rough asphalt of the alley. The hideous rider had detached from the massive saddle of a seat and was flipping midair over the incredibly long, tall handlebars to fly forward in the general direction of Spike and his two combatants. 

The second bike had experienced a slightly more controlled disaster, and was skidding out sideways as its rider did his level best to keep the situation to something not entirely fatal. In the end biker number two just sort of lay impotent and still, pinned beneath his massive hunk of death-metal. He spent the rest of the time trying to shift it off of himself with reverse push-ups. Couldn’t. 

He would be easily dispatched.

Meanwhile, bike three basically crumpled from the front, then did an inelegant swan-dive half-sideways into the wall, just a hair in front of Buffy (which sucked). Though, its rider hit the wall head-first right afterward and, from the looks of it, telescoped his un-helmeted head into the bricks to lie very, very still thereafter (which sucked a lot less). 

Buffy rose from between the three wrecked bikes to survey the oncoming wave. Casually drove her sword through the wide-eyed Hellion pinned beneath his machine-tomb, then took her stand. She had a good vantage; between and mostly behind a lot of piles of twisted chrome, jagged, steaming metal, road-rashed flesh, and filthy, road-dusted leather which clogged the alley. She spun the sword in her hand, let it catch glints of sun from over there at the edge of the alley that was not in shadow, and allowed a feral grin to bare her teeth and light her eyes as she faced them all down. And tilted her head in invitation. “Next?”

There was no shortage of takers, though maybe not necessarily because they wanted to play. A lot of it, Buffy thought, was because they were going too fast to stop. Honestly, Buffy was kind of glad of the little breastwork of damaged machine building up between herself and the mercenary force as the Hellions came on, because came on they did. 

Luckily, aside from a few really skilled riders, the new leading edge of bikers mostly just began to stack up as they fought to skid out sideways, not run over their buddies, assess the situation, yadda. Buffy took the opportunity to slice off a head or two for the ones who had managed to wend their way through—you know, to add to the pile-up and general chaos—glancing back over her shoulder as she did so to see how Spike was handling himself. 

He seemed to be doing fine. One of the two bikes behind her was lying on its side, and Spike was currently in mid-air, having launched himself horizontally at the Hellions’ leader, arms spread wide and sword out, fangs bared and ready to rumble in the universally-accepted ‘it’s you or me, fucker’ challenge. 

/Just please don’t get yourself stabbed in the guts by metal claws, okay?/ He’d survive it, since Captain Hellion wasn’t wearing wooden stakes on his hands, but Buffy wasn’t exactly in the mood to spend another two days trying to nurse her idiot vampire back to health. Not that she wouldn’t, but she’d rather have him more or less in one piece and in fighting form. At least for the next couple of hours, anyway. 

Swinging back, Buffy took up her post, and watched as insanity reigned amongst the attacking force of chaos-monsters. /And that, my demon-y non-friends, is why we don’t come racing into a tiny, bottleneck alleyway at fifty or sixty miles an hour, even when you’re only facing one or two people with swords./

There was always a way to even up the odds.

Between waves Buffy risked another, more thorough assessment behind her. And okay; Spike was doing fine. More than fine, really. He was taking out his  _ aggressions _ . 

Baldy wasn’t much of a combatant at the moment, which was great since he was hopefully someone they would preserve as a hostage. Spike had knocked him back from the start with what looked like some really neat trick involving… What was that in his wrecked front tire? A broken broom handle? Anyway, the injured Hellion had fetched up against the dumpster and was sprawled out behind her vampire, face-down and writhing a little and basically out of the fight. /Harley preserved and everything./ One thing Buffy had always known about Spike. When it came to calculated mayhem and smooth execution of violence, she could count on him to hold up his end… as long as she didn’t ask him to wait too long to play. 

Her vamp was currently facing off with leader guy—Razor, Willy had said his name was?—sword out and at the ready in a really recognizable, trained pose that Buffy knew from hours upon hours of drilling with Giles and trying not to listen to an endless, monotone, British voice telling her that she was standing in an ‘undisciplined fashion’ with ‘poor posture’. 

The way Spike held his sword right now was actually straight out of the ‘someone taught me how to use a katana correctly’ handbook, which was… interesting. 

It was also pretty clear that claw-boy wasn’t used to fighting on foot, much less against someone who was armed with a sword. He was a snarling, slashing, spitting mess. “Vamp-boy, I’m gonna have your ass for my own personal party-favor. I’m gonna stem the rose with you for a week till you cry blood, then throw your ashes out in the sun…”

Spike didn’t answer. He wasn’t even in game face anymore. His expression just set to that grim, illegible thing that said he was on deadly autopilot. 

/Dammit, this isn’t going to work if he can’t…/ Buffy swung to take off another demon arm, beheaded a ninth or something oncoming Hellion, swung back. She needed to help him. They needed to get their mark out of here and around the corner to their waiting team, or signal Willow, or this whole thing was going to go to hell. They were eventually going to get swarmed under if this turned into her holding the alley against the entire gang while Spike had a duel with the leader. “Spike!”

He jerked. His face hardened to something bleak; a shifting of priorities from the personal to the requirements of the group. /To what I need from him./ 

Buffy knew she would never be able to ask, or calculate, what that sacrifice had cost him as he feinted with a back-slash-block along his forearm to catch a clawed punch, shifted his feet, ducked under the next swipe Razor made, came up from beneath… and drove his sword low into the monster’s belly. A maiming, rather than a killing blow. 

He then sheathed the dripping sword in one swift movement and turned away to rip the hunk of broken wood out of the spokes of Baldy’s front wheel, while the Hellions’ leader was still staggering. “Get him, pet!” he roared, and yanked the bike upright. 

Buffy leapt over the last rank of rent metal and flesh, drove her own sword-bearing fist into the Hellion leader’s ugly, iron-skewered maw for emphasis, and grabbed the twitching, bald biker by the back of his leather vest. Tossed the heavy, ugly body over the rear of the motorcycle, and slapped Spike’s shoulder. “Go!” 

Nodding, he kicked the thing into gear and roared off around the back of the store, looking, she noted in passing, beautifully competent as he kept the terrifying machine upright somehow, despite its wobbling uneven weight. 

She prayed he’d be able to navigate the narrow path of shade as he rounded the corner. There was basically about four feet of it behind the building, under an awning, before it gave out back there between where the two cars were parked. 

Turning back, Buffy waited for the signal, kept guard, and watched the kicked anthill roil. The injured leader, the one they could just as easily have killed just now, was straightening, eyeing her with bloody murder in his eyes. 

“Buffy!” 

Xander’s voice. Time to bail.

Swinging around, she pelted away around the structure. 

Spike was leaning against the back of the building, still on the motorcycle and huddled in the shade of the awning. Xander and Giles had the bleeding, half-conscious Hellion wrapped in a haphazard bundle of chains in the tiny rear seat of the Citroen and were preparing to peel out. Willow was up against Spike with one hand on his leg, wide-eyed and staring. “Hurry!” she hissed as the tiny, boxy little car peeled out with a protesting shimmy to vanish toward the Espresso Pump and freedom. 

Buffy nodded, sheathed her sword, grabbed Spike’s duster, and swung aboard the motorcycle behind him. Shoved her hands hard against his waist and clung. Her leg just barely fit between the seat and the wall as she pressed up against him. Full-body contact was the thing here, for this spell. Not that she was sad about that.

Fragrant herbs rained down over their heads like a hail of heavy, stanky pixie dust.  _ “Simus invisibiles oculos omnium! Invisibilia enim etiam dicimus omnia!” _

They were just in time. The resurgent wave of Hellion wrath came boiling around the corner of the building at that moment, frothing with injured willingness to wreak vengeance. Overheated motorcycles shrieked. Bleeding, road-damaged, bullet-riddled and sword-slashed forms pelted out of the alley into the wider space of Sunnydale’s back streets… and blew right past them, unseeing, murder on their minds.

“Well,” Spike murmured blandly, and pulled out his Zippo to light a cigarette. Pulled in a drag and yanked his purloined Harley upright to watch as the boiling mass of them disappeared around the next bend, “that was just… neat. Nice work, Red.”

Willow let out a shaky breath. “Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Goddess, I was scared for a second that… Wow, that really worked!”

Buffy pulled her cheek away from its bed of fragrant black leather to blink at her friend. “Are you saying you were worried about it?”

“Well, um, I mean, not officially, but I’ve never actually tried it with three people and a motorcycle?”

Spike guffawed slightly and threw his partially-smoked cigarette down onto the asphalt. It lay in the sun, smoke drifting upward in a slow plume. “Right, then. How do we get this beast out of here? Because I sure the bloody hell can’t drive it past this point.”

Buffy nudged him in the shoulder and smiled slightly. “We’re gonna have to figure something out. Because for one, I’m kind of enjoying the idea of William the Bloody, proud owner of a rumbly motorcycle…”

He glanced over his shoulder at her and grinned. “Yeah?”

“I could get used to it.”

“Well then. Guess we better find a place to stash ‘er.”

“I second the motion.”

Willow rolled her eyes. “If you two are gonna do creepy flirty things, can you do it when I’m  _ not _ touching you? Like, preferably somewhere in the next state?”

Spike’s smirk widened, though his eyes never left Buffy’s face. “No promises, Red.” And, standing up a little, he flexed his hips back against Buffy and kicked down hard to start up the bike.

/Nnnnngggkkk./

Seriously. No promises.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
Can we just put them in our pockets, though? In those quiet little in-between moments?   
*squish!*  



	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EEE, I owe you all so much love for the beautiful feedback. Will do that soonest. My bad. Been neck-deep in writing the sequel to this story, did about seven chapters in the the last week, and just barely came up for air in the last day or so, so... 
> 
> Well. Here we are. In which we try to break a Hellion to get the 411, and we see Spike shine as he shows the white hats reason number 151 out of 10,000 that it's sodamngood he's on their side!!! And, too-also, some things come out which will stand to clear the Scooby air, but which might stand to cause real problems in the short run, dynamics-wise.

The captive, injured Hellion was being held back at Giles’ apartment, which Spike quipped was, ‘the unofficial demon-prison in town’. Wil, crammed in beside Buffy with her butt against the passenger door of the DeSoto, shot him an alarmed glance for his almost jocular tone, but didn’t comment as they blew down Maple past the denuded movie theater and careened around the corner to Oak Park. 

“Home sweet home,” Buffy joked blandly as he parked the light-tight car in front of Giles’ apartment and grabbed up his blanket. 

“Oh. Yeah. Missed it like life.

Buffy touched his hand. “I’ve got you.”

He flashed her a quick, earnest blue glance, full of enough faith that it blew her away. “I know it, luv.”

“Okay, I’ll go get the door open.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

Buffy hesitated, the thought of leaving him alone out front of this apartment building making her quail even though she knew for a fact that they had left every Hellion in town behind them somewhere; back in the downtown area probably milling around looking for their lost compatriot. /What if their dead buddies told ‘em that the Slayer’s hangout is here off of Oak Park, before that first night? What if…/ 

Instinct made it incredibly difficult to leave her guy here alone and unprotected, even if they knew he could protect himself now. 

“I’m good, Buffy. It’s just for a mo’, yeah?”

“Right.” Still, she hesitated as she backed a little away toward the waiting Willow, who had her hand poised on the door-release.

“Oh my God,  _ I’ll  _ go make sure the door is unlocked. Jeez!” Cranking the door open to the tune of a startled curse-and-jerk away from the sudden sunbeam, Willow flounced out of the passenger door and jogged up the steps, muttering something about ‘codependent, much?’ and waving her arms around her head.

“At last, a moment alone,” Spike muttered in a satisfied tone.

Buffy grinned and reached back to yank the door safely to once more. “Okay, but for like, five seconds. Then you have to do your death-defying vampire-hazard-act again.”

His hand rose to brush her cheek. “Been dancing with death in the sunlight since I met you, Buffy,” he whispered, and trailed his fingers through her hair. “Golden, lethal… irresistible.”

Buffy felt her eyes close involuntarily. “That’s… poetic,” she breathed, shaken. 

His hand slipped abruptly away from her. Startled, she opened her eyes, wondering if she had said something wrong, and found him looking at her with the weirdest expression on his face. “What?”

“Nothing, luv. Just…” He shook his head a little, as if he’d been abruptly plunged into a cold creek and had to shake the chill waters from his hair. “Best be off, yeah? Got business to attend to.”

“Oh. Right. Sure.” 

She followed him in his mad, smoldering dash up the steps and opened the door for him to hustle into Giles’ place, well aware that there was for sure something there that bore investigation later.

The tableau that met them inside was to be expected. Xander stood over their captive Hellion, ready and willing to bash him over the bald, long-eared head with a pointy, steel-sheathed mace. Which he had apparently done already, more than once, if one judged by the thick, dark blood spattered on both the mace and the Hellion’s bald, tattooed skull. The creature was a bloody mess from cracked, aging leather of the motorcycle vest to once-white shirt to road-dusted jeans. There were even a few droplets on the ropes that bound the thing to the chair. The rank aromas of unwashed demon and the fear-sweat of another species anointed the air unpleasantly.

Despite their earlier tiff Anya stood close by, hands on hips and dispassionately assessing the half-conscious, sneering detainee as if measuring him up against previous Hellion interactions and finding him lacking. Giles, of course, was standing at his desk with a book in hand, lips moving as he read something under his breath. Probably a spell either to make the bastard talk or, failing that, to keep him from bleeding to death all over the throw rugs. 

Wil was hovering sort of in between Giles and Xander. Buffy overheard a snatch of conversation as she entered, tried not to react. “…Just so  _ weird _ , you know? So not  _ like _ her! I just really hope it’s not my fault. She  _ says _ it’s not my fault, but…”

The anxious report cut off as if with a hot knife the moment Buffy they noticed the newcomers at the door. 

Probably best to pretend she hadn’t heard anything.

/No, wait, you know what?/ It wasn’t. “Look, you guys. We can deal with your issues with me after the town isn’t burning down, okay? But in the meantime, I’m the only Slayer you’ve got, so can we do this?”

A guilty look from Willow. A betrayed one from Giles.

Xander wouldn’t look at her at all, kept his brick-red countenance focused entirely on the demon-biker-prisoner. Which he then poked, hard, with the mace. “Business. Yeah. Mind on business. Sure. Because all our minds are on  _ business _ .” His tone was snarky, vindictive, and pointed. “I have  _ my _ mind on business. I’ll business any info we  _ need _ out of this guy, right  _ now _ . Right, skull-brain?”  _ Jab _ .

Giles’ head didn’t even rise out of his book. “Xander, stop abusing the half-conscious captive. He’ll bleed more on my floor, and I’ve already got enough of a mess to clean up.”

/God, if he keeps taking it out on the thing, it’ll be dead before we can use it against its posse./ With a heavy sigh, Buffy lifted her eyes to Anya… and caught a brief lift of one shoulder and an apologetic half-smile from the ex-demon, as if to say, ‘What can I tell you? They’re human.’

/Right./ It would take a while.

Throwing Anya a small, grateful smile, Buffy opened her mouth to offer Xander a sharp reminder that they did actually need the Hellion in one piece… but before she could speak, she was bumped hard in the rear by smoldering vamp-a-la-blankie. “Sorry luv. But can you move your gorgeous arse out of the doorway?”

“Oops, my bad.” Jumping quickly aside to make room, Buffy tugged in her slightly-smoking vamp boyfriend, watched him toss the blanket off to one side and proceed to the usual stamping-out ritual. 

The blanket was getting holey. Time for a new one. 

It wouldn’t do, after all, to set that head of hair on fire before she got a chance to play with his curls. 

“Ah, just what was needed today,” Giles bemoaned. “Dark demon blood, embers, and charred synthetic blanket material scattered all about the flat…”

“You volunteered to host the Scooby campout, Watcher,” Spike reminded his fellow Brit cheerily—or, you know, cheerily for him—and tugged out a cigarette. “So,” he asked, pointing with his chin at the bound guest. He popped the cigarette between his lips, “he talkin’?”

“Do you honestly think I’m going to allow you to smoke in my flat, Spike?”

Spike lifted his scarred brow, pulled the thing from his lips, and casually sauntered past Buffy with the tiniest nod to shoulder Xander away from the Hellion. Xander opened his mouth to protest, but Spike only held up a hand to cut him off. “Shut it, Boy.” And catching hold of the nearest ladder-back, Spike flipped it around to sit with legs astride, still holding the unlit cigarette between his fingers. Folded his arms over the back to peer at the lolling demon before him. Nodded. Stood a little in the chair to pull out his Zippo. Lit the cigarette with practiced economy…

“Spike, I know you heard me when I said...” 

Buffy forestalled her Watcher with a flip of her own hand, watching closely. “Wait.” She had seen this before, somewhere. This self-assured, stalking approach, the way Spike was holding himself. Even the way he was managing his smoking. 

This was… Was this theater? 

It was like he was in a play. 

Spike took a drag from the cigarette, then pulled it away and held it for a moment, lightly ensconced between the first two fingers of his left hand. Tilted his head a little. “Wotcher, mate?” he essayed finally, looking slightly regretful. “Rum go, innit, being tied to a chair in this shitehole? Been there meself. Rotten load of kiddies pokin’ at you…”

“Hey!” Xander protested, sounding dumbfounded.

Spike ignored him. Buffy didn’t blame him. There had been just the slightest flicker of returning awareness from their captive, which meant one of two things. Either it had been playing up its injuries as a way to keep them off its case and now it was willing to respond in the hopes a fellow demon might offer the opportunity for escape… or sheer, standard hatred for vampires in general (or recognition of Spike, in particular) had engendered enough of a response to rouse the thing from its blood-loss-induced coma. 

“Here. Need a smoke, I’ll warrant…” Leaning forward a hair, Spike reversed the cigarette and shoved it lightly between the semi-conscious demon’s blubbery-looking lips. Probably only Buffy saw how insanely tense his shoulders were right now, as he fought to be comradely toward the thing whose compatriots had so violated him, and which would no doubt happily do the same to him once more, given the opportunity.

“I knew he was on their side,” Xander hissed, coming around to stand closer to Willow. “I mean, are you guys  _ seeing _ this? Why are we letting him even  _ talk _ to…”

Buffy stared at her tone-deaf friend. Xander wasn’t this dumb. And even if he was being extra-especially dumbass about something that day, his military memories should tell him what Spike was doing, right? That this was like the ‘good cop’ interrogation tactic thing? 

It had to be willful blindness, brought on by hatred. It was the only thing that explained all this ‘look! I’m so justified in my suspicions’ stuff. 

Spike ignored the byplay, of course. He was totally focused on cracking the nut that was their ‘guest’. And honestly, Buffy was glad he had volunteered himself, considering he was really the best person around to do the job. He had, as mentioned, been in the Hellion’s position, and all too recently; not to mention he would know more of what to ask than any of them, barring perhaps Anya. “So, here’s the situation as I see it, mate,” he went on, pocketing his Zippo. “You’re royally fucked, is the deal. You’re in the Slayer’s custody, and she’s right brassed off at the lot of you, bein’ as you’ve turned her town upside-down. You’re here in her inner sanctum—or one of ‘em, anyway—smack dab in the midst of her own little army.”

The Hellion had come to enough to lift its head a little. At this, it sneered, the move pulling at a scar at the corner of its mouth so that the metal studs on its face yanked at the bald head. The entire effect was gruesome. All the skin there pulled on one side, and it was just nasty; like that thin packing tissue about to rip. Except, you know… flesh.

Spike ignored the derision to rattle on regretfully. “I’ve been a captive long enough I’ve given up. There’s more afoot in this town, as well, you might’ve noticed, than meets the eye. Bunch of soddin’ Nazis runnin’ about doin’ experiments on demons, capturin’ us and puttin’ us in cages. Makes a bloke take his chances. Run ‘n hide.” He waved his hand around the room; a vague, weary gesture. “Few bloodthirsty white-hats doin’ a bit of cagin’ of their own. That one over there…” He nodded with his chin at Anya. “Vengeance demon. Helluva one in her day. Thousand years old, has done things to not a few men’s bits and pieces I wouldn’t like to mention in manly company, yeah? Would turn your… Well, you’ve no hair to speak of, but it’d turn your teeth straight.”

The bald demon shot Anya a wary look. Anya straightened with pride.

“Any road, they tamed her down in a few days…”

“Hey!”

“And me. I’m a solid century and a quarter old or nearabouts, not countin’ my human life. Did me two Slayers in my time, and now I’m a slave…”

/Alright, hold up now… ‘Slave’ is a strong word!/

“…So I figure, you’re in a spot of trouble, lone Hellion like you, facin’ up to a lot like these.” 

The Hellion sneered again, but this time the expression carried a little less weight, and the pale, piggy eyes darted from vampire to former vengeance demon and back again, looking a little uncertain.

Spike pressed his advantage, a cold twitch of a smile gracing the corners of his mouth and a calculated squint just touching his eyes. “They don’t look like much, but they get you where it hurts. Make sure you got no one’ll come for you. An’ I mean no one. Get you alone…” He let his breath hiss out, shook his head a little, face downcast. “Take you apart, put you back together, turn you into one of ‘em.” He straightened a little, flamboyantly not looking at Buffy. Probably so he wouldn’t laugh.

/Ohmygodwow…/

“Probably best if you just do what they want before they set their witch to work on you, else you’ll be next. Forced to be a white-hat’s slave for the rest of your life, doin’ their dirty-work…” He paused, affected a confused expression. “Or is it, clean work?” A little shrug, and his eyes cleared again, firmed. “Doesn’t matter. Won’t ever be a decent demon again.” 

/Oh for freak’s sake…/

He leaned forward, hard into the back of the chair, all concerned intensity. “I promise you, mate. In two, three days, you won’t recognize yourself, won’t wanna go home to your mates, will be ready to throw yourself at the Slayer’s feet, or one of her minions, ready to serve…”

Buffy covered her mouth and fought not to turn away, fought to keep down the hysterical giggle that bubbled up in the back of her throat. Spike was weaving a tale of terror and misery and eternal, do-gooding servitude for this poor, confused, idiot Hellion. Watching the horror building in its eyes was just utterly hilarious, because probably it sounded like a demon’s idea of hell on earth; and the best part was, Spike’s ‘service’ was utterly voluntary. He hadn’t chosen the chip, sure, but he  _ had _ chosen to throw in his lot with Buffy. And the Will-Be-Done spell had, in the long run, been little more than a catalyst to what, she knew now, would have eventually happened between them anyway. /One way or another, we would have ended up here. It’s just… us./   


It made for a good horror story for an unrepentant demon, though; one who wouldn’t be scared off by your standard threats. Because from his perspective, ‘tell us what we wanna know or we’ll kill you’ wouldn’t faze a thing like this, wouldn’t break pack loyalty. No doubt the Hellions would do worse to a traitor than any of them could stomach doing to their prisoner if he didn’t talk, for one, so that threat was kind of nil. Torture was probably kind of ‘meh’ too, to a creature for whom light torture was brotherly love, and who was sitting there stoically grunting through the agony of multiple bullet-holes like they were flesh wounds.

Spike seemed to think the same. Eyeing the demon’s damp, oozing torso, he nodded over toward the kitchen. “Oi, Rupes. How about a drink for our guest, yeah?” He glanced back, caught the Hellion’s eye. “Watcher here’s not big on the JD, but he has some damn fine Scotch…”

The Hellion grunted noncommittally.

Buffy shot her Watcher a covert look, noted that he was watching Spike with a thoughtful air. With a faint nod to himself, Giles turned on his heel and headed for the bar. 

“Oh, so now we’re giving the thing  _ drinks?” _ Xander demanded, thoroughly nonplussed.

Everyone ignored him this time. Giles reemerged from the kitchen, handed Spike a tumbler with a couple fingers of amber liquid at the bottom. 

“Ta, Watcher. Here you are, mate. Fortify yourself. You’re gonna need it.”

The Hellion sneered some more, but allowed Spike to tip the glass to its lips, swallowed. Hissed—probably because it had internal injuries—and grunted again. 

“Better?”

Another grunt. 

“Alright then.” Setting aside the tumbler—sans coaster; Giles winced at that, but at least he didn’t set it on, like, a book, right?—Spike turned back to his audience. “What’s your name, mate?”

A short silence from their hostage, then, “Why?”

“Might be around a while. Thought we should get to know one another, yeah?” The Hellion went slightly more pasty, dark blood visibly draining away from the veins showing around its ears, and its tattooed face set fiercely. Spike rattled blithely on despite. “Demons all stuck servin’ the white hats together should be able to call each other by name. ‘Spect you know mine… but just in case, name’s Spike…” The moniker earned him a hiss, which he passed over as if he had never heard it, turning just his shoulders with a casual head-tilt and a wave toward Anya. “Vengeance over there’s Anyanka.”

“Welcome to the fold, Hellion,” Anya answered cheerfully, and waved back, clearly playing along, because she was no dummy. “It’s not so bad. Some of the humans are even very good at sex, if often the owners of very poor attitudes.”

“Okay, you know what…” Xander exclaimed, face suffused this time with what looked like an entirely different sort of emotion. 

The Hellion looked extremely uncomfortable. “I don’t… When I…” Its face shut down. “No.”

Spike’s lips twitched. “Used to bein’ the one in charge, is it? Idea of bein’ someone else’s toy doesn’t suit?” A little, philosophical shrug. “Well, you’ll get used to it. I’ve started to have fantasies about collars and chains myself. You’d be amazed how adaptable a demon can be, under the circumstances…”

Buffy felt something warm start to snake up through her being, shook it off resolutely. /Act. It’s an act/ she reminded herself with firm discipline, and stubbornly disregarded the covert glance Willow shot her way, laced with shock.

“Granted, a few haven’t been. Slayer had one wasn’t. Couldn’t manage to behave. Master vamp, name of Angelus. Ever hear of him? Sod couldn’t ever toe the line, so she did him with a sword, sent him to hell for disobedience. And not a fun hell either.” Spike actually made a moue and threw in a little  _ ‘tsk tsk’ _ , ignoring Giles’ choked noise and Xander’s stunned, swiftly-stifled titter. 

Buffy was doing her best to sort through a highly-conflicting mass of emotions that landed somewhere between amused and dismayed as Spike wove his inexorable tale of complete nonsense. Because the thought of Angelus, demon slave-boy, punished for disobedience, was just more than she could cope with right now.

“Course, maybe you’ll luck out and no one’ll find you attractive…” 

/That’s so incredibly the likeliest possibility. Oh my  _ God _ , Spike!/ This tale of the evil Slayer and her posse capturing a demon harem for their perverse uses was like the worst godawful pulp novel, but it was clear that the Hellion was falling for it hook, line, and sinker, if one judged by the growing revulsion on its scarred, iron-edged face. 

It was actually kind of hilarious, though, watching her friends fight to control their own horrified reactions as they caught on, since clearly the story was working and they didn’t want to wreck it. After all, it was such an insane inversion of the truth; that having someone like that nasty Hellion as a sex toy would be hell for  _ them _ , not the demon! Or, apparently, both. But still.

“…Though, you never know. Watcher’s said to have had something of a past. And not to mind what sort of bits his playmates had, come to that, long as they were demons…”

“I  _ beg _ your pardon!” 

“Heard a bit of a rumor from my sire about him and a hell of a monster once, name of Eyghon…”

Giles turned a fascinating shade of magenta and appeared to do his best to turn into a mushroom.

“Figure if he could take on a nasty like that, he might find you quite a tasty dish.”

The Hellion gaped at Spike, and Buffy thought she detected the beginnings of a tremor or two. 

“So, not gonna tell me your name, is it?”

Dogged silence. 

“Well, time for that as we get on.” Spike nodded, pushing himself up against the back of the chair. “Right, then. Let’s get down to it. Figure you were probably expecting them to torture you a bit, and all you had to do was keep your trap shut, and eventually they’d put you out of it. Even odds for you, considerin’ you’re probably in a fair amount of pain, and not much use to your mates at mo’, innit, injured? Figured you could do your best for ‘em by holdin’ it down here?” 

A twitch of the eyes from piggy, which was all the confirmation anyone needed. The Hellion had never meant to talk, no matter what Xander and Anya had been prepared to do to him down here. Truth spell, maybe, but… Well. Willow’s spells had a tendency to backfire. 

Spike’s method, so far, really seemed to be bearing fruit. Might as well let him keep spinning his insane yarn. “Witch was only waiting for the Slayer to get back,” he informed the Hellion, all conversational. “Get her orders. Thing is, any second now, Red there’ll cast her mojo on you, make you into Rupert’s little plaything…” He glanced around the room. “Or, I suppose maybe the Boy’s, though he doesn’t seem all that taken with you…”

“Are you  _ kidding _ me?”

“Hey, opposites attract, innit? An’ we all know you’re the resident demon-magnet.” 

Xander hovered briefly between bewildered and murderous. His shoulders rippled as if he was seriously considering whacking Spike over the head with his mace. Anya rolled her eyes at him and he sighed, muscles relaxing.

Spike turned back to the bald demon, threw in a theatrical little half-shrug as if writing the whole thing off. “Thought I’d warn you. Let you know what you were in for.” He pressed his lips together, pulled out another cigarette and shoved it in between them; Buffy kind of thought it was to forestall a smile that was threatening to escape, judging by the twinkle in his eyes. He didn’t light it, so he wasn’t nervous or anything. Actually, he looked triumphant, on top of the world, like he was really enjoying screwing with their captive. Not that she blamed him. From his perspective, a mindfuck of this kind was possibly almost better revenge than a quick ‘spot of violence’, since he got to make the Hellion sweat for a while, the way…

/The way he had to do in that motel room for a couple of days and nights, wondering if they’d find us, recapture him. Oh./

It made her see the scene with new eyes as her vampire prodded the Hellion with only his words, needling it, keeping it on edge. “Oh, by the way, I’d get used to the idea of a new name, since you’re not volunteering one. Something cute and pet-like; maybe ‘Baldy’, or ‘Slick’, or ‘Shiny’. And your new master might remove the metal from your face, dress you up different to how you’ve been. Make you wear nicer togs. Somethin’ along the lines of a nice, forest green button-down and black slacks, or summat like that. I lucked out that mine likes m’ wardrobe, for the most part, though on occasion I might be asked to toss in a bit o’ color here and there, which I’d no doubt do without question, should she want me to change things up a bit…”

/Oh? Interesting./ 

“My name’s Dome!” the Hellion blurted, eyes bulging. “Slacks? What? I can’t ride a mule in…”

“Oh, Dome, Dome,” Spike tsked, and pulled away his unlit cigarette. “Didncha hear? I’ve been given your motorbike. Wee gift to me from my mistress, for good behavior. Sorry about that, mate, but them’s the breaks.” And rising, he moved away to stand just behind Buffy and to her left, as if making a statement of his ‘belonging’. 

Having him there again, at her left side, was like being completed. And for the record, her vampire should have some kind of Screen Actors’ Guild award or something for that performance.

A vast silence fell over the lime-and-amber toned room as the scoobies gaped at Spike, and ‘Dome’ awaited the crashing guillotine of his ‘sentence’. Spike broke it by clearing his throat slightly and pinching Buffy’s butt; not hard enough to hurt, which was lucky, or he’d have gotten a serious headache for his pains, but just enough to make her aware that, you know what? Probably it was her turn to jump in and give her best effort toward the whole production. 

“Yeah. Um. Right. Uh…” Turning to Willow, Buffy bit her lip. “Okay, Wil… Might as well, you know, start the spell. The…” This was sounding way too… not ‘General Buffy’ enough. /I need to sound more like I’m used to giving this order. More, like, decisive./ “The enslavement spell. And make it super-strong this time, okay?” She turned back to eye the bound Hellion with what she hoped looked like a thoughtful, suspicious air. “I get the feeling this one’s gonna be pushy, and I don’t want it to give Giles any trouble when he’s… having his way with it…”

Giles made a croaking sound from where he had taken shelter behind his desk.

“…Or taking it to the mall to dress it up for… formal affairs, like nice dinners at the Watchers Council to show off his species. I don’t think they, you know, have anything much on Hellions in the books, so they’ll probably want him in stuff he can strip off quick so they can inspect his, um, anatomy, and…”

“No!”

Buffy ignored him to nod at Willow. “Start the spell.”

Wil blinked, then lifted her hands in a hesitant sort of way. “O…okay, Buffy. Um, Slayer. Right. Uh, L… Let the Spirits take heed! Let the, um, Masters of Supplication bear witness as I…”

_ “No!” _ You don’t need to  _ do _ that! I’ll… I’ll tell you what…” The Hellion sagged.  _ “Gurchek _ take me. I’m  _ fucked _ …” Closing piggy eyes and shaking, the dusty, blood-soaked monster subsided, trembling. “Just… You have to promise to off me, after. I don’t wanna go back. I don’t wanna live as a traitor, and what Razor would do to me is…” A short hesitation. “Not worse, but almost as bad…” The dented, bloodied head lifted, and all signs of dazedness had gone from those tiny eyes, replaced with an evil-angry but insightful gaze, burning at them all with resentment, but clear of anything but rage and pain. “What do you want?”

Low in her ear, so low only she could hear it, Spike whispered, “Get him, luv.” And Buffy felt the nudge of his hand against her lower back. 

Touching her fingers briefly to his in gratitude, Buffy stepped forward. /How much harder would this have been and how incredibly long would it have taken, if you hadn’t softened him up for us?/ God, he was amazing, and she… /I really, really love you, Spike./ 

Standing before the Hellion, Buffy crossed her arms and looked down, surveying what was no longer a captive but an informant. “Your people are scattered, broken. I wanna know three things. One, how many encounters have you had with those commandos, and where?”

Dome hesitated, but she had started with the easy one, the one least likely to make him feel like he was being a complete traitor. Two would give him a little pause, three was the wild card. But they all knew that it was a lot easier to keep someone talking once you got them started than it was to crack them at the beginning. 

For that, apparently, you needed a Spike.

“Okay. Fuck. Shit. Bone and Craw ran into some of ‘em first, over by that little ice cream shithole. They got Bone. Razor got pissed, so we went in. First, we tangled with ‘em over in front of the theater. They shot us up. We molotov’d their asses. All ‘cept for Inks. He molotov’d himself; dropped his cocktail in front of the ticket booth and went up. Dickhead. Lost some boys and two mules. Came at ‘em again down by the Doublemeat.” A broad grin creased the cracked, puffy lips then. “We blew that fucker up and chowed down on some burgers after, on our way out. Scragged six of the bastards.” 

Xander moaned, low and regretful. “The Doublemeat is gone? Man, I  _ loved _ that place!”

“You would,” Spike muttered.

Dome’s grin was fading. “Had a couple skirmishes on the way back into town, holed up in that alley. That’s when we saw your ass, and that fucking vamp.” A fierce glare in Spike’s direction.

“Okay. That leads us to Two. What’s your strength at now?” 

As expected, the Hellion hesitated at this question. However, he’d already let go; and besides. He knew they had seen his guys in a fight, assessed their strength, so it would be more in the nature of confirming something she already knew. “Fine. We came into this shitburg with thirty-two Hellions. We’re at twenty-four now. Happy?” Then the metal-lined countenance tightened. “Twenty-three, I mean. I’m out.”

Buffy nodded and wondered if she was about to get a headache. “Are you counting before or after the ones we took out in that alley?”

A swift glare met hers, which bespoke endless wells of unfulfilled vengeance. “Fine. Bitch. Nineteen or some shit. Whatever. You and your vamp toy took out a fuckton of my brothers. Goddamned whore.”

Spike was there before Buffy even had a chance to react, moving faster than she could even register it. To her amazement the bald head snapped to one side to the tune of a resounding  _ smack _ as he backhanded the creature, hard enough that the demon’s ugly mug actually ricocheted against the back of the chair. It came up glaring, but Buffy barely noticed, having turned to stare in surprise at her vampire, who was bristling next to her, all scowling menace and growly vamp-boy snarls. “You’ll keep a civil tongue in your head around the Slayer, you poxy munter, you don’t want to lose it!” 

He was actually huffing. It was really kind of adorable. Like, she could fight her own battles, but… Well. He was sweet, wasn’t he?

Also, what the hell was a ‘poxy munter’?

As if realizing he might have stepped on the whole show he’d just set up, Spike slowed down then, and actually came very close to blushing. Dropping his hand he stepped back a little, and managed to look vaguely wrong-footed. “Sorry, Buffy. Lost my head for a second. Know you can handle yourself. I’ll head on back…”

Alright, now he looked like an erring schoolboy. Shaking her head slightly, she patted his hand. “Appreciate the gesture, though.”

Rubbing the back of his neck, he nodded, still a little embarrassed, and returned to his station with the rest of the Scoobies. 

It took Buffy a second to school her face back to ‘hard Slayer, leader in the fight against evil’ so that she could turn back to the Hellion and resume the business at hand. She might make Spike a little squishy, but he had the power to return the favor sometimes, okay? 

“Alright,” she managed finally. /Nineteen. Nineteen is manageable. A lot more manageable than thirty-two. Maybe I’ll send a fruit-basket to those rando-commandos./ Feeling Spike’s eyes, warm on the back of her neck, she shook off the thought. /Maybe not./ “Based off of that…” /Nineteen of them. Six of us. Which means each of us would have to spray three motorcycles. Then, once they’re down, it’s all hand-to-hand. They’re not used to fighting that way. Well, bar-fighting, maybe, but not  _ trained.  _ Like, Spike’s a brawler too, but he obviously went out of his way to learn how to fight over the years. Though, granted, if you’re gonna go after Slayers; and of course he’s no ordinary demon…/ 

/ _ God _ , I miss matching with him./

Buffy shook herself, reset hard to the task at hand. /Getting off track, Buffy. The Hellions aren’t trained fighters. At least… They have methods when they’re on the bikes, but they’re definitely not the same on foot as when they’re mounted. And if we have Wil doing her disorientation thing, maybe…/ It wasn’t the same spell as the invisibility one, and of course it all depended on whether she’d worked out how to do any spell to more people than herself without it flopping completely—Wil’s protests had been serious, and were they pushing her too hard?—but at the same time, this was more a spell on the ground than on a bunch of moving people, right? /And Giles said he’d help her./ “Is there anywhere your guys might try to hole up, lick their wounds? Aside from Willy’s, since they’re probably still out looking for you, and I’m guessing they’ll wanna stay closer to downtown.”

Dome straightened a little from his demoralized slump, squinted in sudden concern around his swelling eye. “What the hell are you planning, Slayer?” he hissed.

Buffy shot a smile back at Spike, and then a little more broadly across the ranged array of her friends. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

***

Buffy stood catty-corner from the wrecked-looking bar on Main, just outside the official town limits between Sunnydale and Goleta started; not that there was any real demarcation. Up there, somewhere about a mile away, UC Sunnydale’s campus started cropping up, over there on Fairview across from Happy Burger. Till then it was mostly strip malls, cheap housing, and the occasional fast food place. And this dive, which might even give Willy’s a run for its money, but really seemed totally the Hellions’ style. “Hey, in there. We’ve got your guy. Just thought you should know.”

She could feel her people at her back as the first Hellion showed his ugly mug outside the bar’s black-painted doorway. Could feel Spike over the rest, anxious as hell that he couldn’t back her up where she stood out in the sun, should things go awry. He’d insisted on coming anyway, of course.  _ “I’m the Slayer’s bloody chauffeur, Watcher,” _ he’d snapped as they’d left Dome behind under Willow’s apparently wildly-intimidating eye,  _ “and any road, we won’t all fit in your pisser of a car, will we?” _

_ “Leave off badgering me about the Citroen, Spike,”  _ Giles had answered tiredly.  _ “It goes, doesn’t it?” _

_ “Yeah, if you get out and paddle along like you’re the bloody Flintstones…” _

_ “Alright, alright. You know what? You two should never be in the same car, anyway. It’s like listening to third-graders. You. DeSoto. Now. Giles. You and Xander and Anya, back us up.” _

_ “As if he can help you, out here in the daytime,”  _ Xander had groused as they’d headed for the door. 

Buffy wasn’t about to explain to the Scoobies that their chances of leaving her vampire behind, alone, guarding their Hellion captive, were basically nil. One, if at all possible he was going to be at Buffy’s back. Two, alone with a Hellion was not his first choice, and three… Well. It wasn’t Buffy’s either, considering she thought they might still need their hostage, if only for negotiation’s sake. Left alone too long, Spike might just snap and break the thing’s neck.  _ “If he starts burning, one of you jump on him.”  _ She was brooking no obstructionism right now from her camp when it came to her vampire’s usefulness. Not especially after the performance they had all just witnessed. If they couldn’t see how big a help he could be to them, they were just blind. 

One way or the other her insistence must have made a point, because all opposition had been silenced. They had made it, and it was time to get this show on the road. It was already like three in the afternoon and time was a-wasting. “Do you wanna make a trade?” she called to the face she glimpsed through the half-open door.

She thought she heard a growl, and the tattooed countenance vanished. After a short pause and what she thought sounded like a mild scuffle, another face appeared in the doorway; a slightly more familiar one. /Razor./ It was easy to make out the Hellions’ leader, with that big tuft of ugly-ass mullet he had going on, and the stupid diamond-shaped tattoo right on his forehead, and the dumb noseless face, and those oogy metal grafts at his cheeks. Not to mention the whole Freddy Kreuger fixation. “You wanna trade us for Dome, Slayer-bitch?” the ugly demon demanded, sounding both mildly surprised and more than a little amused. 

“Well, maybe ‘trade’ is a strong word,” Buffy answered, affecting a head-tilt as if considering her words carefully.

“Too bad for you, little girl, because Hellions don’t make deals. This is  _ our _ town now, and we’re not leavin’. If Dome got himself caught by the Slayer, he deserves to die.” A sneer, or what Buffy assumed was supposed to be a sneer, though it was tough to tell on that uber-stretched-out face. “Little bitch obviously squealed, anyway. Don’t need a rat in this outfit. And besides; bet you already offed him, or he bled out. He was bleeding like a pig before you grabbed him.”

/You’re one to talk./ Spike had gotten the Hellion leader but good. He had what looked like a clumsy field dressing wrapped around his middle, seeping oily-looking blood, and he wasn’t moving with the same spry, wiry bounce as before. And seriously, did these guys have motor oil in their veins just like their bikes? /You’re lucky we need you to keep your guys in a herd, or we could’ve just gambled on them dispersing or whatever and had Spike cut your head off earlier. Grody jerk./

Outwardly, Buffy shrugged. “We patched him up.” /Ish./ “And he didn’t say much.” Which was true. They already knew most of it, already had a plan. The ‘where’ was all they’d needed. All the tips Dome had given them on the ‘how’ had been completely inadvertent. “But as far as whose town this is, I figure we could dispute that when we meet up tonight.”

Razor looked even more amused at that. “And who says we’re gonna meet up, little girl? Unless you want a piece of this.” And he cupped himself lewdly with his clawed hand, jerked his hips toward her while rolling his red eyes all disgustingly. The gesture would have made a greater impact, of course, if the nasty bastard wasn’t practically sliced in half and a whole street away from her, but you know. Still gross. 

Behind her, safely concealed by the shadow of the currently-abandoned Tasty Freeze, Spike growled low and intent. There was a note in that growl that made the hair rise on Buffy’s arms; something new and different and… primal, something that said a whole lot more than ‘don’t threaten someone I care about’ or even ‘what happened to me will  _ never _ happen to her’. There was something in that vocalization that was so deeply primitive and possessive and ragey that it evoked a response inside Buffy’s own core, something in her lizard brain that wanted to burst out, turn to him, grab him, smash her mouth to his, and…

/Wait. What? What…/ “Spike,” she hissed, “if you’re in game face, stop whatever it is you’re doing, because I can’t think right now when you’re being all… whatever it is you’re being.” Jerking her head away from its automatic spin toward the vampire secreted behind her, Buffy fought to focus on the far more threatening demon glaring with violently lascivious intent from the doorway across the street. And heard the faint crunching noise at her back, accompanied by a few harsh, panted breaths, as Spike fought for control. 

He was evidently successful, for the hairs on her arms slowly began to subside, and the thing in the back of her mind settled, slow and grumbling, back to quiescence. /Okay. Alright. Good./ Clearing her throat, Buffy called back with as much chill as she could muster. “Taken, thanks. But I appreciate the offer. Actually, what I was hoping for was a nice, healthy throwdown. You?” Time to drive it home. “Because I’m pretty sure my crew and I could kick your crew’s ass.”

The hyped hand dropped away from the icky Michael Jackson-with-claws pose, and the lazy air vanished. The chief Hellion leaned forward in his doorway, all murderous intent, and spat on the sidewalk. “Little bitch, you don’t wanna mess with us. I don’t know where you been the past coupla nights, but obviously you can’t take us or you would’ve already. It’s pretty clear you don’t know how to hold a territory…”

“I’ve had other things on my mind. No offense, but compared to some of the things I’ve fought you’re pretty low on the demon-meter.” Fluffing out her hair—Spike wasn’t the only one who could be theatrical—Buffy shot for insultingly blasé Valley girl. “I mean, yeah, you’ve wrecked a few things, but when you’ve taken out an Old One, an animated hellmouth serpent-bitey-thing, and sent a Master vamp or two to hell for not minding their Ps and Qs, an invading gang of low-grade bikers is kind of meh.” She shrugged and flicked her fingers a little, as if throwing him and his whole troop in the trash, and wondered if maybe it would look better if she was chewing gum and blowing bubbles. /Fresh out, though. Not that I couldn’t use it. Bet my breath is just the  _ worst _ by now./ It was always better if the opposition underestimated her, and definitely better if she managed to get under their skin, irritate them. “My team’s kind of jaded, if you get what I mean. You seemed like small potatoes. I thought they could take you without me.” She kind of wished she had a nail-file right now so she could easily look away, make him feel he was totally beneath her notice. She settled for studying her manicure instead, frowned in very real concern when she noticed her right ring fingernail was totally chipped. /I should just give up on the mani-pedis. They cost too much anyway, and with slaying it’s just throwing money in the garbage./    


When she looked up she realized she had probably never seen any demon look so infuriated in her life. The scarred, petty demon-king was practically frothing with rage. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with, you little bitch,” he informed her grimly. “We will  _ end _ you, and then we will turn this town into our personal playground from now until the end of time. We will rape your…” 

“Uhuh, yawn.” Buffy punctuated her words with a clearly faked exhalation, patting her mouth, then nodded. “You do have my attention by now, of course, since you started burning the shoe stores. I’m gonna kill every one of you for that.” She shrugged. “But not till later. I figured I’d give you a sporting chance. And I hear you have a thing for your motorcycles, so if you want your boy and his bike back, they’ll be there too. Fairhaven and Twenty-Sixth, at sunset.” She gave the bastard a coquettish twiddle of the fingers. “Tootaloo, pretty.” And, turning away, she swung back around to head for the shade.

“What the hell makes you think we won’t just come after you now, you fucking bitch?” Razor called after her, voice filled with an incandescent ire. 

“Because I’ve already given his motorcycle to my pet vampire, Spike. Know you remember him. If you want it back you’ll show. You won’t get it back otherwise, and you’ll always know that the vamp who killed five of your people is out in the world, running around free on a Hellions’ bike. Insult to injury, huh?” Which was her sweet way of letting him know that Spike had done away with one of the two Hellions he was missing, and she the other. Heh.

The silence she got in answer said they had him, long before the low snarl that answered her. When Razor spoke, his tones promised bloodcurdling, slow death. “I am going to eat your intestines while I rape you bloody with my clawed hand, then suck your eyeballs out through your throat, you whorebitch…”

“Yadda yadda. See you tonight.” /Walk away. Just walk…/

The worst part was, she could very vividly picture him carrying out his threat, which just made it all the more clear that they needed to destroy these… things. 

Rounding the corner, Buffy rejoined her crew, doing her best not to betray the fact that she was trembling. “Well. That went well.”

“Oh my God,” Xander whispered. 

“That was… quite unpleasant,” Giles agreed tightly.

“These are the moments when I wish I still had my amulet,” Anya put in, sounding sober and irritated. 

“Actually, Ahn… I’m kinda with you this time.”

Buffy said nothing, just leaned wordlessly into Spike where he stood to her left in the shadows. He contributed nothing for a moment, merely took in her tremors, laid an arm around her. After a moment, he whispered, “You alright, luv?”

She had to shake the image. It took a little extra breathing, and a lot of ignoring her friends and the way they shot startled looks her way, as if it hadn’t occurred to them until just that moment that she might have been shaken up by the things that gross bastard had said, the threats he had made. “Yeah, she breathed finally, and turned a little so that Spike could survey her face, read the truth there. “I’m okay.” Checked his look too, to make sure of him. “You?”

“I’ll do.” He would. He was also a little shaken, but he had himself together. “We should get the bloody hell out of here, though, in case the bastard decides to follow up.”

“Yeah. I don’t wanna be anywhere near any of ‘em till it’s time to fight.” She shuddered again.

“Same, luv.” 

They started off, leading the way back toward the cars, under the back awnings of the buildings and through the network of shaded overhangs, with the truncated Scoobies jogging behind. 

Of course it was Xander’s voice that broke into the semi-private conversation. He sounded mystified. “Why would it get to you that much, what that idiot said? I mean, you could beat the hell out of him if he tried, right Buffy? It’s not like he could ever… hurt you, or any of us, with you around, so…”

The weight of it hit her, all at once.  _ ‘With you around’ _ . But she had been, and still… And,  _ ‘If he tried’… _ And…

Buffy started to shake. Felt her fists clench involuntarily. Something acidic boiled up in her throat, and her legs churned to a halt. Beside her, outside of some bright, pounding haze, she thought she could feel Spike—just Spike, no one else—like some kind of calm, sure spot in a chaos of heartbeats so big all of a sudden that they threatened to overwhelm her. She knew he was tense too, but his tension was a distant thing, and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t…

Before she knew it, words were lunging out of her throat, words she thought she would never say. “Slayer strength doesn’t always help, does it Xander?” she demanded harshly, and kicked off again, leaving the haze behind. 

She broke into a jog, heading for Spike’s car.

* * *  
  
  
  
I mean, Spike, though.  
Also, how do we think he's gonna react when he puts two and two together, here? Tune in next week!   
XD


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is the point where these two took my "you do know it's only been two days, I have rules" law, and started playing serious libido-chicken with me throughout the rest of the fic. Because their chemistry doesn't take a challenge like that lying down.
> 
> They're very intractable creatures.  
Blessings, btw, to my betas, and apologies if anything was missed, as I also added some things post-beta!

Spike was clinging to the steering wheel with all he had so that he didn’t head back out and kill Xander. Which would be the end of  _ him _ too, of course. The migraines would dust him. They might not ever let up. Neither of them had any idea what would happen if he... “Spike, please.  _ Please,” _ Buffy whispered, hand light but tight around his wrist. “I honestly think he doesn’t remember. I just snapped. Don’t…” She felt her voice catch, aware something inside herself would break if he… /I can’t lose both of you. I wouldn’t… survive it./ “Please,” she heard herself whisper. “I’m  _ begging _ you. If you… Spike?” 

Nothing. And god, his arm under hers was like steel. 

He hadn’t moved or spoken since they’d gotten back to the car. Buffy knew he had only followed her there instead of ripping Xander’s head off on the spot out of sheer loyalty to her; devotion to her emotional needs, because she had been falling apart. That constancy they had built between them had been the only thing that had saved Xander’s life in that moment; and probably his own while they were at it. Because otherwise, if she had not been in need…

/God; any second that he thinks he’s free, he’ll just…/ “I  _ can’t _ lose you,” she whispered, and she no longer cared that she was pleading. “I really can’t.  _ Please _ .”

He came alive; just the faintest hint of a tremor under the iron flesh beneath her hand, then words, grated out and harsh. “You’re still friends with the sonofabitch.”

She couldn’t breathe. Looked down at her knees; focused on the dirt and filth of two days and whatever sprinkled on her jeans. Spots of demon blood and alley muck and a little motel-carpet-lint, maybe, and... And she was crowded so close to Spike in the car that there was basically no space between them; as if by her sheer physical presence she could bind him to her side and keep him. “I…” God, all her old defenses wouldn’t work. Not here. Not now. They were all bullshit anyway, and she knew it. After the last few days… /All crap./ “He doesn’t remember. And if he does, I know he regrets it. Regrets the part of him that… wanted it.”

The growl was back, with reinforcements. The same one as before; the one that made Buffy’s everything stand up and take notice, scrambled her ability to think. She didn’t have to look up or hear the crunching bone to know that Spike had vamped. 

Fighting to keep her thoughts in order, to breathe, Buffy struggled with it. “He… won’t do it again, because the demon—it was a pack-demon—they’re all gone. And I… I have to forgive him if I can forgive Anya, and if I can get past the stuff Angelus did wearing Angel’s face, and if I can forgive…” She let out a breath, uncertain if she should even say it. If she needed to.

Spike went very still. “Forgive me?” he asked tightly. “For the things I’ve done?”

It hung there for a moment, between them. And, it needed qualifying. With them, it did, so she forced her eyes up to focus on his taut profile in the low light of the DeSoto. They could remain cocooned here, away from the outside world. Like the motel. Their own sort of twilit, liminal space, where they could work out complex questions like this. “Not… the same kinds of things, I know. But… for me, with my job… You know what I am, Spike. The only way I can do this is… I have to be able to look at… the people behind the… urges, and know that…” She bit her lip, hard. “I can’t make one rule for one set of people and another rule for… for another set. I can’t. Not and see everyone as people. It’s one or… the other.”

“Oh, fucking Christ.” Spike went abruptly limp, sagged back against the low seat of his car. His arms dropped away from the steering wheel, and his head fell back so far it almost looked like it was about to fall off behind him into the back seat. “Bloody hell, Buffy.”

“If I condemn Xander, then I can’t be with you,” she told him softly, and lifted her eyes firmly to stare at the side of one outstanding cheekbone. And waited.

“Bloody fuck.” He started to shake along with her, and she realized that, insanely, he was laughing.  _ Laughing! _

As abruptly, the pained wheeze ceased, like it had been cut off with a knife, and he was looking at her, game face gone as if it had never existed. And oh god, the agony in his incredibly blue eyes. “Why the bloody hell did you have to put it that way, dammit?”

“I don’t know how else to work it in my own head, or I can’t…” She pulled in a breath, let it out, maybe said a prayer. “It’s the only way I can do this.”

There was a short, weighted pause, and then, “I get it. I do. Jesus.” His head fell back once more against the stupidly low seat. And he stopped breathing. Reached out, fumbled blindly for her hand. “Guess this means I’m not allowed to break his soddin’ neck for him.”

/Oh God./ “Please don’t. Even if I didn’t have to watch the chip slowly kill you, you know the position that’d put me in with everyone else. Do you really wanna do that to me?” It was probably manipulative and a low blow, but she would do whatever it took, dammit. 

“Oh, hell.” He rolled his head on the seat to stare at her, amazed, and his words came out in a whisper. “Way below the bloody belt, luv.”

“I know,” she whispered back. “But I’ll do whatever I have to to keep you.”

His expression turned awed. “You will, won’t you?”

“Yeah.”

His gaze locked on hers. And this felt like a kissing moment. And she just really, really couldn’t. Not till… “You know what? We need to get back to Mom’s house.” /I’m probably compartmentalizing, and I don’t care./

Spike’s eyes narrowed, the spell briefly broken. “What the bloody hell for?” he demanded, thrown.

“I so need to brush my teeth. It’s been like two days since I have, and I really, really wanna make out with you, and I so can’t till I do that, and if you keep looking at me like that I’m completely gonna forget that I haven’t, and it’s gonna be the grossest thing, and I’m absolutely not going to go there with you for the first real time, not under a spell, until I’m all minty fresh…”

Shooting up straight, Spike reached for the keys and abruptly turned the car over. “Shoulda told me there was gonna be snogging involved. We’d already be there.” 

Okay, so the eagerness was cute, not to mention heartening. “I mean, I’d like a shower too, but I figure that’ll have to wait till we’re not at DefCon-demon…”

The car was already out from under the partial shade of the Taco Barn and blazing down Main, little stipples of not-quite-light dappling Buffy’s skin and probably making Spike’s crazy. “This need to be a lonely shower, or… I could do your back, yeah?”

Buffy was surprised enough to giggle. “Let’s, uh, save that for after the kissing, at least?”

“Tall order, but I’m a patient man.” 

They made it back to Revello in what was seriously record time.

***

“Okay, all minty-fresh!”

“Thank bloody Christ.” Before Buffy knew it, she was against the wall in the hallway, her back to the stairway, with one very intent demon very much in her face, hands sliding cool and determined up her sides. His forehead was against hers, and he was breathing like he was running a marathon or something, which was impressive for a being who really didn’t need to do that at all. 

He also had kind of amazing amounts of strain going on in his arms. Which she knew because she had her hands on his biceps. Mmm. “I like your arms.”

“Well, that’s handy, pet, since I have two.”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “I mean, like this. Remind me to keep you fed.”

He moved up closer, pressed his body against hers, and her hands slipped numbly away, down to his waist. Something in her brain short-circuited a little at the feel of him all along her hips, her belly, her nipples pressed to his chest… /And okay, let’s be real, it’s nice to know how a guy feels about you./ Spike was really just putting that right out there, which was good for the ego and stuff. “I, um…” His head slid away from hers, mouth drifting to her neck, and whatever she had been about to say dribbled right out of her brain. There was just too much going on, between the still-extant instinct that she had honestly forgotten until just now that was one part human, trapped inside her and screaming ‘Danger! Predator!’ and the two parts that were Slayer and were getting… Well. One Slayer part seemed thoroughly pissed off that this vampire had gotten so close, like some sort of battle had been lost and should be fought again, at length, and the other was getting more and more excited over something Buffy couldn’t quite put a name to; something wild and roaring and exultant.

That part was swiftly swamping the other two reactions, to the point that she felt like something was about to snap inside of her. Like she was about to… whatever. Go weirdly feral, forget her thinking brain, jump up, wrap her legs around him, lose her mind completely and... 

And then there was the purely confusing and wildly arousing physical level, because okay, Spike was doing things to her unprotected, sensitive neck that were indescribable and probably frankly impossible. 

Seriously, how could anybody do so many things with just their lips and, like, barely the tip of their tongue?

Breathing. Breathing was a thing, and…

“Alright luv?” he whispered into her throat. And scraped his teeth, very lightly along the taut flesh of her neck, moving up to flicker his tongue just under her ear in that uber-sensitive spot where... 

She felt her knees buckle a little, must have made a sound that was more or less an affirmative. Mostly there was no thinking, because her… Alright, she was a grownup, she could think it; her um, her clit was  _ throbbing _ and she was so, so wet already, which was probably ridiculous, because all he was doing, on paper anyway, was kissing her neck, but there was ‘kissing someone’s neck’ and there was what Spike meant when he did it, which was just sinful and promised all sorts of other delights, ones she couldn’t really imagine, honestly, and was  _ she _ making that noise?

He pulled away then, freed his right hand from her left, lifted it to touch her cheek. Looked right into her eyes, as if reading something there… and then tilted his head slightly, and got that knowing look of his. Caressed the corner of her lips, and said, “Oh, love. No one’s ever tended to you proper, have they?”

“What?” She couldn’t think. Not even a little.

“‘S alright. I’ll take care of you, pet, when we get to that point. Have you screamin’, I will. ‘Twill be my pleasure and my honor.” His thumb pressed, ever so lightly, against her cheekbone, and Buffy found her head lifting a little to meet his mouth. “Spend hours there, finding you where you live. See to you till you can’t bloody walk. Oh, love, beautiful Slayer… Can’t sodding wait. But for now…” And he set his mouth to hers.

God, she had missed kissing him. Had lied to herself and lied to herself, but kissing him was… 

Oh fuck, it was so  _ good _ . 

He tasted faintly like menthol from that cigarette he’d held between his lips back at Giles’ place, and the one he’d smoked back at Willy’s whenever ago, and maybe a little bit of some sort of alcohol he’d probably swigged there at the bar as well, but mostly of that same something she couldn’t identify that she recognized from before, during the spell, which she would just have to file under the rubric of ‘Spikeness’… and of hunger. God; he tasted hungry for  _ her _ , which she had never before realized was a flavor until now, but she could get addicted to it, this taste of someone wanting her so incredibly badly. And she found that she had her arms around his shoulders somehow, and she had made some sort of hungry noise herself, and was fighting to climb into him, and he was doing the most incredibly amazing things with his mouth— _ that _ , she remembered, and she wanted moremoremore _ now _ !—and then he was making triumphant  _ growf _ sort of noise into her mouth, and had seized her under her arms, and was lifting her a little to press her back against the stair. And she felt rather than saw him grinning, and dammit, it was like he was winning or something. She had to get some of her own back, so she dug her fingers hard into the hair at the base of his skull, tugged him around fiercely to guide that amazing mouth where she wanted it… 

“Oh, bloody  _ fuck _ , Slayer,” he groaned into her lips, and his… Oh wow, his erection twitched against her, actually got harder against her belly, and he was diving in for more, and this was becoming something between a makeout session and a battle, and if they weren’t careful his chip would fire but oh god, she couldn’t help that her hips were starting to move, and…

And his hands were on her ass, and he was lifting her, lifting her, and then his leg was between her knees, and… 

/Oh! Oh God!/ 

Her head jerked up fast, caught on the intent challenge in his eyes when she ground down, hard and unexpected on his thigh. And caught his smirk. “Here to serve, pet,” he murmured, and his voice was like hot molasses running through her, but sparking with molten rocks, and she couldn’t stop, she couldn’t make herself stop, and sparks were running all up her spine, and his eyes were so incredibly intense on her, and…

“Go on, love, oh Christ, let me see you…” He bent his head to hers, watched her with blazing eyes, hands on her hips as she ground helplessly down, and this was wrong, this was so not okay, but he was… He looked greedy as he watched her, his palms urging her on as she… As she… And anyone could just  _ walk in _ , and… 

And somehow just that thought had her shaking and biting her lip, and her breath caught, and then…

She didn’t even realize he had his fingers in her mouth until it was over. And then he was kissing her again, gently this time, easing her down. “Oh, bloody hell. Oh, Buffy. Oh, you needed that, didn’t you love. Oh, Christ, pet, that was glorious to see. C’mere.” And he was dragging her close, still shuddering, and she didn’t even know what do to about it as he held her overheated body against his cool chest and stroked her back, and under her hair, caressed the nape of her neck. “Oh love. Oh, my love, my wildcat, oh bloody Christ, I can’t wait to sort you out properly, but what a gift to give me just now…”

He didn’t make any sense. “You couldn’t have gotten anything out of that,” she whispered into his neck, shamefaced and still a shaky, weak-kneed wreck.

“Buffy, you have no idea. Christ, the scent of you right now, and watching you, and knowin’ you trust me with it when you’re losin’ yourself… Even if I never got to touch you again I’d go to the day I dust treasurin’ that moment.”

He was insane. And he was amazing. “What about you?”

He drew in a long, deep lungful of, apparently, the air hovering around her body. “I’ll do. Mmm; bloody hell, Slayer, you smell… Hell; I could sodding eat you alive.”

Three days ago that would’ve been a threat. Now it just sounded like a really good day. “What… exactly would that entail?” she heard herself asking. None of it could be bad, really. 

He pulled back, looked her right in the eye. “Know my grandsire’s a jackass, but apparently so are college boys. Don’t have to ask you what they didn’t do, love.” He grinned broadly. “I may not be good, Buffy, but at some things… I will have to say I think I can do you a good turn.” And he waggled his brows… and wiggled his tongue distractingly. 

/Oh.  _ Oh! _ / Blushing madly, Buffy struggled between wanting to hide and gasping at the concept of that mouth… Warm shivers danced all over her body at just the thought, and… “I don’t… Nobody’s…”

“Picked up on that, pet. Wankers.”

“You don’t have to…”

“Oh, I most certainly do.” God, he looked intense. Almost as hungry as he had when he’d grabbed the container of blood from her at the motel. “Buggering hell, Buffy, do you have any clue… Slayer, if I had my way I’d have you on your back with your knickers in my pocket and my face in your quim for hours, and be the happiest I’d ever been. Hell, I’d be well chuffed just to have just fifteen minutes buried in your sweet cunny, but I’ll take all the grace you’ll give me.”

She was going to combust. Just burst into flames. Allegedly it was vampires who were supposed to be flammable, but he was doing the most incredible job of trying to kill her by starting her on fire with words; in more ways than one. “What about… I thought guys just wanted… That that was just to…”

A finger trailed slowly down her flaming cheek. “Oh, I’ll shag you too, love, but not till you’re begging. Not till you’ve come so many times you’ve forgotten your soddin’ name, and mine.”

She almost could again just with this little pre-show conversation. “You… talk a good game,” she managed, haltingly. 

He tilted her chin up, smiled right into her eyes with deadly certitude. “I’m not God’s gift by any stretch, pet, but I’d do my bloody best to be one for you, as you’re one to me.”

/Oh. Oh wow./ “I…”

“Oh, you’re back! How did… everything go?”

Buffy tried to jump out of her skin at the sound of her mother’s voice and footsteps descending the stairs  _ right behind her _ . Spike, for his part, didn’t so much as step away from where he had her pressed against the wall with one shoulder literally digging into a stair-spindle-thing. Which she had, by the way, completely not noticed, not even a tiny bit, till just now. 

He did, though, have the kindness to lower her off of his thigh. Which was, well, necessary, but she was a little sad about it. He even dropped his boot to the floor so they looked more casual, standing there. Ish. As casual as anyone could look who were all smooshed together against a wall like they were inspecting each other’s tonsils. And stuff. “Oh,” he answered, all chill and relaxed, “it went as well as could be expected, Joyce. We got one of the bastards, put him on ice at Watcher’s flat. Interrogated him a bit, went and taunted his mates. Set up a meeting for tonight. Everything’s in place, right Buffy?”

Buffy cleared her throat. Note how her vampire’s hands had not moved one tiny bit from her waist and face. /Note how I’m so not doing even a tiny thing about it./ Though, right now she probably wouldn’t have had the power. All her focus was still mostly going toward keeping her knees from giving out, and if this was what their chemistry was like with what had basically been making out and a little… well,  _ petting _ …

/ _ God _ ./ “Yeah. That’s how…” Okay, her voice sounded way too breathy. She put a little more  _ oomph _ into it, fought to ignore Spike’s smug look. “That’s how it went.”

Mom completed her descent, rounded the bottom of the stairway to approach them. Halted with one hand on the top of the newel post and gave them a knowing look. “And now we’re having a celebratory makeout session?”

Buffy found herself praying very, very hard that Spike’s duster hid both how incredibly damp her jeans were, and that he probably had a wet spot on his at this point, as well as the evidence that he was still, um… /God, we came so close to… Right here against the… And Mom was just  _ right upstairs _ , this is so not good./ “Well, um, you know; there was fighting, and everybody came out of it okay, and…”

Mom nodded slightly. “Well, if you’re planning any celebrations of survival, please keep them somewhere not under my roof if you don’t mind. I’d like to live in the fantasy land where I know my daughter is doing all the things I don’t want to think about, but I can pretend she isn’t as long as I don’t have to know about them.”

Arrested, Buffy frowned. “That was convoluted, Mom.”

Mom smiled sweetly; a smile that slid from her to Spike and turned flinty. “Convoluted thinking and propriety keeps people friendly.”

Spike’s hand dropped ostentatiously away from Buffy’s waist to drift up to his hair, and he sort of patted it briefly, then nodded and let it fall to his side. “Well said, Mum. Friendly it is.” And his other hand slid from Buffy’s face to tangle with her fingers. “All very… companionable.”

“Excellent.” Mom’s expression went back to bright, cheerful, welcoming. “So! Where are the rest of the troops?”

/Troops?/ “Oh. Um, mostly over at Giles’ house with the Hellion we captured. We have kind of a breather till nightfall, and then we’re going up to sort of by Rugg’s Field for the big showdown…”

Mom made a worried sort of face. “That sounds… really open. Are you sure that’s a good spot? I thought you wanted something more… enclosed.”

“We’ll be up a bit more by the graveyard, Mum,” Spike informed her staunchly, and with a firmly honorable and, it must be said, highly platonic kiss to her knuckles, disengaged his fingers from Buffy’s hand. “We’ll have a bit of a bottleneck to work with.”

/Damn. Great. Now he’s never even going to, like, peck me on the cheek, ever again within breathing distance of this house. Fantastic. Guess you’re coming home to live with Mom, Mr. Gordo, and Wil will just have to.../

/Oh. Oh  _ God _ …/ This was going to be complicated. 

Mom was looking somewhat fretful. “I wish I could help. Maybe I can. Can’t I, I don’t know, drive a getaway car or something?”

Buffy felt the beginnings of alarm. If her mother wanted to start being a Scooby the world was really about to come to an end. “Uh, that’s probably a bad idea, Mom. We don’t want you to become a hostage for their side or something.”

She deflated a little. “Yeah, I suppose so. Well, I guess I can stick to manning the safehouse.” She shot Spike a little smile. “Keep the cocoa on. I’m well-stocked with the kind with the little marshmallows…”

“You’re a saint, Joyce.” 

/Suck-up./

Mom smiled, if a little distractedly. “I guess I can try to keep my mind off of things while you’re out there. Watch ‘Passions’ and…”

Spike perked up, a note of excitement creeping into his voice. “Missed the last few. Was stuck in a motel room with no telly. Timmy still down that sodding well, is he?”

“Oh!” Mom’s face bloomed into something utterly rapturous. “You know how it is. He’ll be there till at least Christmas, the way they stretch things out…”

Sparking to a fellow devotee, Spike literally walked away from Buffy to close with her mother, like a moth to a candle. “Oh, surely not. You reckon so?”

Crossing her arms and feeling a little deserted, Buffy sighed. “Wow. Just wow.”

Spike half-turned, shot her a faintly shamefaced look. “I love you to bits, pet, but I’ve missed two  _ days! _ Mum’ll have me caught up in half a mo’… Now, Joyce,” he went on, turning back with urgency thrumming through him, “what about that business with Charity…”

Mom waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, that’ll all be cleared up before the end of the week, I’ll bet.”

“I bloody well hope so.”

Buffy shook her head in amazement. “I really can’t  _ believe _ this.”

***

After a super protracted conversation about their dumb soap opera, Mom finally got around to asking Buffy what she was doing rooting around under the kitchen sink. Spike, trailing his fellow enthusiast into the kitchen, caught the fire extinguisher Buffy threw at his head only by dint of his supernatural reflexes.   
  
“Buffy, what are you… Oh!” Mom exclaimed as the crimson cylinder flew past her shoulder. 

“Unlike some vampires,” Buffy informed her mother, though her caustic tone was for the guy standing behind her, “I’ve got my mind on business.”

Spike scoffed in a way that somehow managed to remind Buffy exactly how little her mind had been on business about ten minutes ago as he lowered the red cylinder. “We’ve a couple of hours, luv.”

/Yeah, maybe we should’ve gone somewhere else. God knows where, but…/

Mom looked confused. “Is there a fire somewhere?”

“All over town,” Buffy muttered grimly. /And in my pants, for probably the foreseeable future…/

Spike threw her a shushing look and tilted a genial head at her mother. “You remember, Joyce, that bit in the plan where vengeance bird went on about disabling the motorbikes?”

“Oh, right, of course.”

Spike hefted the extinguisher, grinning at a returning Buffy. “Wasp spray for our bitty infestation.” 

“Excuse me?”

“Bit of a long story. Got any more of these about?”

“Oh. Um, one in the basement, I think, and one upstairs in the…” 

Buffy snapped her fingers. “Back of the linen closet. Got it.” Action to work off the sexual frustration, and dammit, why couldn’t they at least fight, again? 

She was starting to experience misplaced anger at a lot of things. Hellions, that chip in Spike’s head, Mom… even Spike a little, for cooperating with Mom. 

/I need to chill./

Descending once more with the (much tinier) upstairs extinguisher, Buffy overheard the ongoing conversation, taking place through the tinging of spoons on ceramic, and frowned. /Oh, no…/ 

“…Such a fantastic duster, and obviously lovingly kept, I’ve always wondered where you…”

“Well, that’s a long story, Joyce, and one you might not like all that much.”

Buffy bit her lip and froze on the lower steps, uncertain whether to just run away, or maybe charge in there and throw the extinguisher onto the middle of the table and shriek at them—some lie about an incoming attack or something—anything to halt this hideous conversation. /Stop, Spike. Just stop, or Mom will forbid this whole thing and stop being on our side, and I can’t deal with having  _ her _ against us too!/

“Is it a bad story?”

_ Ting, ting, ting _ , and what were they  _ doing _ in there? “Well… Not a lot of good stories, back in my younger days,” Spike warned. “Honestly, not a lot of good ones from before I met your daughter, Joyce. Had a bit of a sea-change, really, of late.”

/Oh my God Spike, shut  _ up! _ /

“Well, that’s… fairly touching, actually. Bad boy gone good…”

Buffy bit her lip, well aware of precisely how Spike might react to being called ‘good’. 

“Good’s a strong word, Mum. Tryin’ to do right by Buffy, though. Might get it wrong, once in a bit, but… Tryin’.”

That should be an ‘aww’ moment, except Buffy was still trying to decide whether she should just go in there and dust him for being so chatty. Probably she couldn’t actually get away with it, right there in front of Mom. There’d be too many explanations, and…

_ Ting, ting, ting _ . “Did you, um… kill someone for the coat?”

A short, pregnant pause, and Buffy found herself holding her breath. Then, “Someone as didn’t have a mum about with an axe to tell me to get the hell away from her daughter.”

/Oh Godohgodohgod.../

“Was a fair fight, a’ course. Kill or be killed an’ all that rot, but…”  _ Ting, ting, ting _ . Stirring cocoa and engaging in pleasant chitchat over his history of Slayer-slaughter. This just kept getting better and better. _Not._

/Don’t tell Mom you sought her out. She wouldn’t understand. She  _ really _ wouldn’t./

“Buffy’s lucky to have people about as love her. Gives her life, strength…” Spike’s voice throbbed with sudden passion. “And it makes the nasties hangin’ about take a moment, realize what she is. And by the time some of us have reassessed, we either realize we’re outclassed and run the other way, or we fall in love. Hard not to admire someone stronger than you, when you’re a…” He halted again, and the  _ tinging _ ceased.

Mom was silent for a moment, then, quietly, “A predator?”

/Oh, crap./

Spike didn’t deny the charge. “When you realize you’re not top of the food chain anymore, and some slip of a girl has become the one thing that’s topped you out as the apex predator…” A throbbing intensity entered his voice, and she could picture him leaning over the table, cobalt eyes earnest in entreaty. “Mum, Buffy may be your daughter, but to us she’s the thing all the baddies in the world have nightmares about. And she’s transfigured me. I’ve spent over a century trying to be the baddest thing on Earth so I could protect a woman who couldn’t always protect herself. Now all I wanna do is use that to stand by the left side of a woman who protects everyone else.”

Buffy sat down hard on the bottom step, shaking.

A short silence resounded throughout the dining room, and then, “I think… I understand.”

Buffy could breathe again. Mom had just accepted another, deeper layer of ‘my daughter’s dating a vampire’. And it was a much scarier layer; one the Scoobies knew and Mom hadn’t, before now. 

“So the coat is…”

Buffy could hear it in his voice as well. Relief, at Mom’s conditional acceptance, and an overarching willingness to meet her, as long as she was still extending a tentative hand. Holy crap, Spike would work so unbelievably hard, as long as anyone gave him the slightest chance, and why had Buffy never seen that before now? /Because we always closed every single door in his face with the whole ‘vampires don’t change’ schtick. But that’s nuts, because he’s like the most changeable creature in the entire universe! He never sits  _ still! _ / It actually terrified her sometimes, how mutable he was. 

Except there were some things she could  _ completely _ count on with Spike. He would always choose the exciting path. He laughed at danger. /And he loves me./

“The coat is… armor. And a promise, to myself, now, not to be who I was.”

/Oh. Oh  _ wow _ ./

“You… weren’t wearing it, before.”

/Before, when he was already with me… Well, see, Mom, there were extenuating circumstances with commandos, and an ex, and the whole shackled in the bathtub thing…/

“Had to retrieve it. It was in custody of an angry former.”

“Former… Oh, an ex?”

“Er, yeah. Had brassed her off a bit. Had to do some fast talking to get her to give it up…”

Buffy sighed and pushed herself to her feet. Time to reenter the conversation. “Actually,” she reminded her guy as she rounded the newel post and entered the dining room, “technically it was me that convinced Harmony to give the stupid duster back, because you were being a prize jerk to her. Like, apparently, usual for you two…”

Mom glanced up from her cocoa cup and held up one hand. “Wait, Harmony as in Harmony you went to high school with, Harmony?” Her eyes narrowed, jerked back to Spike in that, ‘wait, exactly how many very young women have you dated’ suspicion leaking into her eyes, and how had she missed that before?

/Well, crap./ “Harmony’s a vampire now, Mom,” Buffy broke in before her mother could get all wound up on the wrong track. “She got turned during graduation. Spike was trying to help her figure out her unlife, one thing led to another, and…” Shrugging, she plunked the miniature extinguisher down on the table next to the larger ones and moved to tug out a seat next to her guy, firmly twined her fingers in those of his right hand, on top of the table and visibly, in a show of support before he could escape. They were warm from cradling the cocoa cup, and she smiled absently at the oddity of it. “Anyway, it’s probably a good thing. No telling what would’ve happened to the duster if you’d’ve had it on you with those commandos…”

“Did, actually. Left it behind after, when I was tryin’ to get her to give me a bite to eat.”

“Well, alright. Still a good thing. Probably it’d have rope-marks on it by now, from Giles’ place. And it wouldn’t’ve fit in the bathtub.”

“Not comfortably,” he agreed equably. “Might’ve provided padding, though.”

This aside successfully diverted Mom from the Harmony thing. “Bathtub? What?”

Buffy spoke without really thinking. “We had him chained up in the bathtub at Giles’ apartment before everything. And tied to a chair after that.” Her hand moved of its own accord to brush up along the side of his hair, where the mousse was coming loose because it didn’t have the hold of gel, and he’d been through a few things since earlier. There was a curl coming down, just there, above his ear. 

He turned when she touched him, eyes lambent on hers. “We need to figure out what to do with you,” she whispered, gaze locked on his. “Where are we gonna put you, Spike?”

“Dunno, pet. S’pose I don’t have anywhere much to be but in your arms. Which isn’t the worst prospect.”

“I can’t keep you safe from the sun, though,” Buffy whispered back. “And I do have class.”

“Right,” he answered, apparently still as lost in her eyes as she was in his. “Could hover about in your dormitory, though I expect Red wouldn’t like it much.” His thumb had begun a slow caress on the back of her hand; subtle, but somehow impossible to ignore. Her body was lighting up, starting from parts south that had nothing to do with her hand and moving north toward her nipples at a rapid rate, and her lungs seemed to be losing function…

“Wait a second. Are you actually saying that you were living with Rupert, but he was keeping you chained in the  _ bathtub?” _

Buffy jerked guiltily away from cerulean eyes she could drown in to blink at her mother’s shocked exclamation. “Oh, um… Well, you see, the thing is… He was…” How could she even explain it? “We didn’t know if…” /Dammit, stop that, I so can’t think when you’re…/ Spike, she very much noticed, never even slowed down with the steady stroking thing he was doing with his thumb that was in no way helping her to focus. Well, at least on the conversation, anyway. 

He did, however, eventually tear his eyes away from her profile to regard Mom very politely as he answered in turn. “They weren’t entirely sure I would be on my best behavior. I’ve a microchip sort of thing in my head, courtesy of some sort of military outfit has been gallivanting about town nabbing demons and experimenting on ‘em. Can’t bite anyone, can’t even have a decent punch-up with anyone save another demon. Buffy and I can’t even spar for fun…” His thumb did a little dance on her hand that promised plenty of alternatives to fighting that could be just as entertaining, and Buffy’s belly swooped dangerously.

“Stop that!” she hissed. “Or I  _ will _ punch you!” She was about to hyperventilate right here at the table. Dammit! “Yeah, we don’t know much about it,” she managed then in a sort of relatively normal voice. “Or not then, but at least we do now. Anyway, um… We didn’t know if we could trust it, or him to keep his word, so when he came to us for help we tied him up…” God, it sounded so wrong now. “Just till we could be sure.”

Mom was staring at Buffy in consternation. “In the  _ bathtub?” _

“It was, um, contained?” At Mom’s continued shocked expression, “Okay, look. It was maybe a bad judgment call, but in our defense, we’d recently had some very bad experiences with soulless vampires, so we were all in the ‘better safe than sorry’ camp when it came to trusting words over deeds, and…”

Mom’s eyes shot over to Spike’s. “I thought you two have worked together before.”

Buffy blushed and sighed, looking down at the table. “God, I’m never gonna live this down, am I?”

Spike stilled his thumb, lifted her hand to kiss the spot he’d been low-grade assaulting. “Not your fault, luv. You know I understand. Hell, in your position I’d’ve done the same.”

She blinked up to stare at him, surprised. “You would’ve?”

“Yeah. Honestly, I’d’ve no doubt done you all in if I hadn’t given my parole, could I have managed it.”

/Wait, what?/ “Your parole? As in, ‘on parole’?”

Spike shook his head, another of his faintly ironic smiles dangling on his lips. “Older usage, pet. Means my word to behave myself while in the custody of enemies, and not to raise my ‘weapon’ against my foes till I was ransomed by my own folk. Old concept, part of that chivalric gentleman’s code I’m not supposed to follow in the slightest anymore, bein’ a vampire. But you know… one gives what one hopes to receive, yeah?”

Buffy blushed again and resumed her inspection of the table. Spike had so not gotten what he’d given in that respect. When she looked back at the way they’d treated him and thought of all the ways he could’ve gotten revenge without triggering the chip in the slightest… “I’m sorry.”

“No need, love,” he murmured. “As I said, I understand. Angelus did the hell of a mind…game on the lot of you. God knows I understand that, bein’ as he did it to me the whole time I was comin’ up. Can’t hold that against you. Any road, Christ knows I’d’ve liked to eat every last one of you, way you were treatin’ me. Either-or, actually, just in the name of past festivities.” A shit-eating grin touched his voice. “‘Specially you, Slayer, wavin’ your neck about the way you were.”

“Oh God.” What had even possessed her, then? That was even before the spell, and she had been… /I was like,  _ daring _ him. Taunting him, wasn’t I? Like a… What was the word Mom used when Dad was doing the secretary? Like a ‘brazen hussy’. Oh God… I was  _ flirting _ . But, like, in a ‘put you in your place, I’m on top of this food chain, if you want me you have to admit I’m in charge’ flirting… Oh crap, oh God, there’s something  _ wrong _ with me…/

Cool fingers brushed the back of her hand once more, this time in a quietening way. “Hush. We’ll discuss it later.”

/Oh man./ Mom was probably watching the way she was blushing with way too much interest, and oh my god, she was actually going to  _ die _ , but…

“Wouldn’t’ve, though.”

/Wouldn’t have…/ Buffy was way beyond lost; sought his eyes, confused as hell. Caught his twinkling gaze, his small, dismissive shrug. 

“For one thing, wouldn’t’ve been worth the headache, yeah?” 

/Oh. Killing us all. Right. Get with the program, Buffy./

“Might’ve knocked Watcher over the head. Red, I’d’ve taken a bit of a nip, maybe. She’s a sweet piece.” 

/Okay, you know what…/ 

“Got a bit of a soft spot for her, though. Probably wouldn’t’ve drained her.”

/Well… good to know, I guess?/

“That chit Anya, demon lass?”

Buffy tensed slightly, waiting.

“Would’ve let her be. She deserves better.”

/Okay, alright then./

“The Boy, though. Him I’d’ve done and grateful. Taken it, migraine and all…”

Now he was just trying to help her get over her embarrassment, get her dander up. With a heavy sigh, Buffy rolled her eyes and played along. “You know, one of these days I’m just gonna put you two in a room and let you duke it out. Of course, I’ll have to arm Xander and tie one hand behind your back…”

“If I may interrupt,” Mom broke in dryly, and turned to Spike. “Do you really have nowhere to go right now but to stay with Rupert? If we can even call that ‘staying with’…”

Spike was doing his best to look unaffected. “I’ll manage for another day or two. I’d graduated to freedom of the flat during daylight hours, though I was still being tied to a chair by night while he slept. P’raps after all this he might relent on that bit…”

“Alright, that’s just unacceptable!”

Spike shrugged it off philosophically. Honestly, Buffy was kind of with Mom, now, though. It was a problem; a very real one. 

“And you don’t have anywhere else you can go, at all? I mean, if you’ve just moved out from living with an ex…”

Spike’s face twisted slightly, and he lifted his cooling cocoa, took a careful sip. “No telling if Harm’s actually gonna take the Slayer’s advice and skip town. If she knows what’s good for her and doesn’t wanna meet the pointy end of a stake, s’pose I could repossess that spot, but it’s sodding well-known by this point, near as it is to that treasure…”

Mom lifted a hand to signal a halt to the conversation. “Excuse me. Treasure?”

“Long story, Mom,” Buffy informed her, and okay, yeah, they really, really needed to figure something out for where to stash Spike. Preferably  _ not _ down where he had lived with Harmony, though. Call her a jealous bitch, but the idea of snuggling with him on the bed where he’d done… stuff with her ex-classmate just seemed… Ugh. 

Also, he was right. Too much foot-traffic. They’d spend more time defending that stupid loot than they would… well. Snuggling, and  _ stuff _ .

Buffy was getting more and more focused, if not determined, to see exactly how good Spike was at  _ stuff _ . /You know, since he seems to be okay right now with offering, and since he likes to advertise so much. And since we can’t fight, and since it’s been, like, a million years since Angel, and Parker was fun, but not, like…/ 

She let out a frustrated breath. There was fun, and then there was passionate. And hardy. /Let’s not forget the hardy./ Whatever had happened recently, when she had lost her mind a little back there and gotten grabby, Spike hadn’t quailed even a little. Quite the opposite; he had gotten fired up just the same as if they’d been fighting, which was…

More breathing. /Just keep on with the breathing./

Not to mention she had the feeling that there would also be tenderness, which… /If you throw together grabby-fiery and hardy and tenderness and ball it all up into one package; and you know, also I get the idea Spike might have a few entertaining ideas of his own…/ 

It kind of made college-level ‘fun’ go right out the window. Parker already seemed a distant memory. “We need to find you a place, Spike.”

He must have caught her vibe. Maybe it was the throbbing quality in her voice, or that little husky thing in the back of her throat. The jerk had a faint smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “I can start hunting about. Not too keen on kipping at Watcher’s either, though I suppose I can convince him for a few more days, till I’ve found something. Might not be the best digs, short notice and all. Not a lot going begging ‘round here, and considerin’ he’s not my greatest fan on the best of days even before he found out we’re a bit of an item, I’ll want to get out quick. I’ll warrant he’s gonna be insufferable the longer I stay, as he’s so bloody protective of you, love, so I’ll have to take what I can get…”

“You’ll stay here. That way you can take your time.”

Their heads jerked around, Buffy with her mouth hanging agape, Spike clearly floored. “Beg pardon, Mum?”

“You can have the guest room.” Mom sounded firmly decided. “I might need to move a few works around. I’ve been using it for art storage, for the gallery, but I suppose I can ask you to help with some of the grunt work, Spike, since you’ll be using the room. Maybe you can even help me get some of the larger pieces over to the showroom floor or gallery storage, as long as we work in the evenings. I’ve been despairing over it since Buffy took her super-strong arms off to college…”

“Mom, you didn’t tell me you needed help…”

Mom waved her off. “You’ve been busy, baby.” She redirected her eyes to Spike, uncompromising. “There’s some craft stuff in there too, that I haven’t had time to touch in twenty years. But if you don’t mind working around all that, there is a bed, and we can do something about the curtains. They’re a little gauzy. Throw a blanket over the window or something. Anyway, it should do until you find a place…”

Putting aside the fact that this solution would in no way help her own personal problem in the short term, Buffy was pretty sure she had never seen William the Bloody look so utterly moved. “Joyce, I’m touched. This is exceedingly kind of you…” Wow, his voice had changed, taken on a sort of longer, less clipped cadence, and it had softened. He almost sounded… Giles-y. 

“Nonsense. I won’t have you wandering around town like a beggar, or putting up with abuse from Rupert and those teenagers until you get on your feet. Now.” Pushing herself to hers, Mom headed toward the stairs. “Finish your cocoa. I’m going to go look over the room, plan things out in my head. You can bring some of your things up whenever you want, though I assume you’re going to need to wait till after dark for most of it. Or Buffy can do it.” She shot them both a quick glare. “House rules stand, though, while you’re here…”

/Dammit./

Spike held up a swift hand. “Joyce, I wouldn’t dream of offending you.”

/Double-dammit./ That was a ‘no way Buffy’s going to convince me to break now I’ve made a promise’, oath-y kind of voice, there. 

She was so not getting laid for the next couple of weeks unless they did it in a cemetery or something.

As Mom vanished up the stairs, looking all satisfied, Buffy turned to Spike. He had a significantly dazed sort of expression plastered all over his face, and a pleased kind of smile hovering over his lips. It was so disarming she gave up being irritated, fondness stealing over her despite her frustration. “Drink your cocoa, you dope.”

“Your mum likes me.”

He was such an idiot. “Well, duh. You’re very likable.”

He didn’t drink, just held his cocoa lightly, fingers looped through the handle, then sighed and put the mug down. “Me mum died, Buffy,” he told her softly. “Watched her go, slow. Tuberculosis. Not much you could do, back then. Did everything I could for her, a’ course. She was my whole world.”

/Oh.  _ God _ ./

“Had no one else. Lost me da when I was a wee lad, older brother to pneumonia, baby sister of a fever. Was young when they all went; scarce remember any of ‘em. Was just Mum an’ me, for most of my life. Losing her was…” He cut off, sounding choked.

Suddenly the way her vamp acted around Mom made a jillion times more sense. And Buffy knew she could never get jealous again if he wanted to glom onto her mother, and hang out and watch TV and drink cocoa and spill his guts and… whatever. He was feeding what was left of his soul in this whole other way. “I’m so sorry, William.” 

“Yeah.” He wasn’t looking at her. Wasn’t looking at anything in particular, eyes centered on the marshmallows floating in the tepid, faux-chocolate liquid. She thought he might cry soon if she didn’t hug him or something. 

Consequently, she slid an arm over his shoulder, held on. “Mom’s good at momming. She’ll hang out with you and… I dunno. Watch weird soaps with you and keep you full of hot cocoa, and do her best to listen even though now you’re with me, and make sure you always have a toothbrush…”

His shoulders shook.

“And expect that you follow the rules and carry stuff for her…”

“Fetch, carry, open the bloody door. Hell.” His voice was shaking a little, and wow. 

Somewhere in there, Buffy realized, was just this guy maybe only a few years older than her, who missed his mom and had been through she really had no idea what since his first death had stopped everything, and… “If you ever wanna talk about any of it…”

“Yeah. Maybe sometime. Later.”

“Okay.” After all, he knew about all  _ her _ worst experiences. And he had a hundred-plus years of crap to vent about. /I want to  _ know _ you./

They sat in silence for a short while, then, “Um, so… I’m really retroactively sorry about the whole bathtub thing, and the… The teasing, when you were so hungry. I guess I was just trying to show you that I was the…” She couldn’t word at all right now, but she needed him to understand, somehow.

His head lifted slowly, and a faint smile resurfaced, turning his gaze from distant and sad to amused and admiring. “The top dog in the ring. I know it, pet. And you are, and I know it, and I love it.” Then, as swiftly as he had been sad and pensive, he turned right back around to warm and instigating. “And to be frank, what’re a few shackles between friends?”

His meaning was clear, and wow, he switched gears fast. /Though, look who’s talking./ She responded to that look basically instantly, that one very particular shiver running through her again, warm and spreading to… places. “Um…”

“Later. We’ll talk about it later.”

Buffy made a noise that sounded a little like, ‘guh’. “I wouldn’t think you’d, um… I mean…”

His grin broadened to something speculative and fierce. “When it’s a beautiful bird on the other side of the bonds, pet,” he informed her, low and intense, “that’s sodding  _ therapy _ .” The grin softened a little to something quiet, steady. “Especially if there’s trust.”

/Oh./ “I…”

“You’ve the right instincts. I’m game for about anything, long as you promise to kiss it and make it better later.”

Warm things got warmer, and… “Maybe… after a while.”

The soft grin turned positively boyish. “Plenty of time for that too. Though… I can be a very good boy, either way. Your call, Slayer.” His fingers brushed the cup, though he didn’t grasp it. “Long as you say I’m yours, say maybe you might be mine sometime, hold me here and there, you’ve got my all.”

/Oh my God./ “Spike…”

_ Thump, thump, thump. _ “Alright. The room’s accessible, at least, and there’s a surface for your things, and a spot in the closet that’s open…”

Spike’s eyes burned on hers briefly before he turned away to thank her mother, and they were really going to have to negotiate some place to start… Start… _things._ Somewhere. Anywhere not here.

* * *  
  
  
  
There's objective time... and there's subjective time. These two characters are living, I think, in subjective time, and they're are very determined to do everything they can get away with within the boundaries I prescribed when I set down my 'behave yourselves!' limits in this fic. Because they're incorrigible.   
  
Stubborn monkeys.  



	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A day late, sorry about that. Hope it's worth it, y'all!!!  
I'm riding high on having just finished the banner for the sequel (I'm on chapter 18 of that one, having just sent ch. 17 to my lovely beta), and I'm so high on that damn sequel it's not even funny. I just hope y'all who decide to stick with this series will enjoy the following story as much as you did this one, because I'm deeply infatuated with it.
> 
> In the meantime, hopefully this chapter will hold some answers to some of your burning questions from the previous entries... Maybe some satisfaction will be had herein. 
> 
> Not too much, mind. But some.

“I suppose we should head back. Get ready.”

“Yeah.” Head back against the couch, arm around her shoulders, and comfy in a fresh pair of jeans and tee Buffy had smuggled in for him from his car, Spike seemed loath to go anywhere, really. 

What was his problem, anyway? Buffy was enjoying cuddle-time too, but the way she was feeling, she could use a good fight. Spike, meanwhile, seemed like he could just sit there forever like this, which was bizarre. He’d had her blood, and he’d made such a big damn deal about it being an aphrodisiac, and yet here he was acting like he had was zero issue with Mom’s whole ‘pretend to be mostly platonic’ law. 

He was driving her nuts, actually. He nuzzled. He was very puppyish. Or maybe it was cat-like, but either way, the affectionate thing wasn’t going anywhere, and it was massively not helping with the constant, low-level buzz affecting Buffy’s system. Like, they had the both of them finally had time for a quick shower… but there wasn’t exactly time to sneak off anywhere. Most of their available waiting period had been taken up with moving Spike’s more imperative stuff from the DeSoto up to the spare bedroom, at Mom’s behest. This feat had been managed via a kind of bucket-brigade comprised of Buffy and Mom working outside, with Spike directing them from the doorway and then carrying things upstairs from there to situate them. By the time they’d finished with that effort and gotten their respective cleanups in--separately, because house rules, and also Buffy wasn’t sure she was quite ready for  _ that  _ adventure--they had been down to only about fifteen minutes of stolen time. And now she was kind of regretting not being more adventurous. Maybe if she had been, she could have inveigled Spike to bend Mom’s strictures a tiny bit, just this once.

/Probably not, but.../

Now, of course, it was too late. With everything coming to a head in less than a half an hour, she would feel guilty and irresponsible and way transparent if she dragged her vampire off early for some stress-relief somewhere sans house rules, before they had to head back into another fight. /Not that we have time to go… well. Anywhere that’s else./ Which meant instead that she was sitting here, finally feeling presentable for all this nuzzling and touching, with no follow-through. It had her in a sort of a state of mind, and was he _ trying  _ to make her nuts? /You’re definitely still evil./

/Or/ her logical brain reminded her pointedly, /he’s just enjoying snuggling, but not ready for anything more./ 

To which her raging, newly but thoroughly-stoked libido snapped back promptly with every evidence to the contrary thus far, itemized and notarized, in triplicate. With indelible carbon-copies. /People’s exhibit A, hallway action. Though, granted, that was mostly him doing things to me. But I can fix that. I can definitely.../

He murmured something about a few more minutes, and nuzzled some more at that one spot behind her ear, and he was definitely the spawn of Satan.

“Okay, time’s up!” she half-squealed and struggled free from his grasp.

He had more arms, by the way, than an octopus. Except that octopuses--octopi?--didn’t have such great hands at the ends of their graspy little tentacles, and he was for  _ sure _ evil. Which meant that it was a relief to have an excuse to jump up and get something accomplished. Relief, and agony, and maybe she still hated him a little? “Alright. Let’s go. Do. Kill Hellions. Then we can come back, move more of your stuff before we have to talk to Xander too much…”

Spike’s hand caught her wrist, held it tight as she jittered. “You alright, pet?”

“Yeah. I just wanna get out of here and get this show on the road.”

“Pickin’ up on that.” His head tilted, and why did he have to look  _ delighted _ by her? “I love you, Slayer.”

He was exasperating. “Stop thinking I’m cute. I’m not cute. I’m going crazy.”

“Yeah. Caught that.” Another tug at her wrist. “Will you think poorly of me if I say I’m flattered?”

/Okay, smug./ “I just… how can you just  _ sit _ there? Unless…” She supposed he could be lying to make her feel good, which would be awful, but fair, considering everything that had happened, and kind of par for the course when it came to the Land of Buffy, and…

His voice broke through her incipient panic, sternly admonishing and somehow still faintly amused. “I’m just as affected, luv. I’m just better at containing it. Have had to be, since I got this bit of plastic in my skull, innit?” 

/Oh./ She hadn’t even thought of…  _ that _ .

Another head-tilt. “Wouldn’t mind a bit of rough and tumble, sure. Either sort, if it were possible for us…”

Everything inside Buffy clenched at the thought of fighting with Spike again; and then… /And  _ then _ . And oh, God, we’re gonna have to be careful, with the chip. If we get too rowdy it’ll start zapping him in the middle of… stuff./ That was so not okay. Not that she didn’t want to have, like, loving-ness and everything, and maybe there was something wrong with her, but something about Spike made her want to just… 

Grr. /And okay, color me scared that maybe he’s the same way with me, and what if we get like that, and we can’t hold back, and what if he gets all chip-whammied because we get too into… stuff, and then.../

There was totally something wrong with her, wasn’t there?

“…But in the meantime, this…” To her surprise he did one of those one-shouldered shrugs that looked almost embarrassed. “A vamp’s not supposed to admit to it, but this sort of thing’s few and far between for me. I’m a bit hungry for it. Even more than most vamps, honestly. Didn’t have much of it in my nest, compared to most. We were fair dysfunctional.” Eyeing her under his lashes, head back against the cushions of the couch, he let a little, almost shy smile play at the corners of his lips, as if he were admitting to some kind of deviancy heretofore unknown. “Havin’ you just touch me like you actually want to, like you care, is still a wonder.”

That brief window into his life was enough to still her. She didn’t really want to think about what life had been like in a vamp-nest consisting of Angelus and Drusilla. Angelus couldn’t have been exactly snuggly, and from what she understood, Ms. Crazypants had kind of split her affections between the two guys, which probably hadn’t made Spike feel the most loved in the entire universe. “Yeah, I guess that must’ve been… hard,” Buffy managed, and dropped back down beside him. “Trios-wise… I mean, I know Wil and Xan and I have our problems, but at least we’re a little more functional than that.”

Spike leaned back a little, eyed her strangely. “Not a trio. Four of us, including Darla.”

“Oh. Right.” Buffy honestly tended to forget about Darla, or tried to. “She was… around?” The question was tentative, for more than one reason. By the way Angel had discussed his sire—brief, clipped, truculent, and with that ‘don’t ask’ intonation—it had been one of those off the table subjects, and one she had assumed indicated he hadn’t had much of a relationship with the sire he’d dusted, but the way Spike said it now, it sounded like… 

Also, you know, anything related to Angel/Angelus was a little touchy when it came to Spike, so… Handle with care was the watchword there. 

For a wonder, he didn’t seem all that bothered so much as just kind of thoughtful. “Yeah. Attached at the hip, those two, for a couple sodding centuries. Never found one without the other…”

Even after all this time, it still hurt to realize yet again exactly how very little she had known about Angel’s life, his past, what had been important to the making of him. She got that he had probably been trying to protect her from what he had been as Angelus, but wasn’t there some sort of unwritten law that you were supposed to know at least the bare outlines of your significant other’s life with their exes? A few pitfalls, some graveyards, and the holy ground to avoid?  _ Something? _

/Guess not, though./   


“...Went off alone half the bloody time and left us to our own devices,” Spike grated on, inexplicably missing her wince. “Fledge like me half bein’ taken care of and half tendin’ to my mad sire, till Angelus finally decided to take me in hand and stand in as sire for me ‘cause Dru wasn’t capable. Loved her, but she wasn’t gonna teach me the ropes the way he could, for better or worse, for all she tried. Trailed off halfway through a lesson most times to talk to the stars or what-have-you. Couldn’t always bring her back, and the way fledges go off half-cocked…” He shrugged, eyes dispassionate with distance. “Fledges need a strong hand. Angelus could provide that, if nothing else.” His mouth tightened a little. “Too strong a one, sometimes.” 

/Eee./ Buffy really didn’t want to know what Angelus’ ‘lessons’ might have been like.

Spike shook his head a little then. “Makes sense, I reckon. Darla must’ve been the hell of an instructress as well. She was a prize bitch.” His mouth twisted again, with a kind of pained humor. “Though no doubt at least her lessons were kinder when it came to the sex portion of things, as she loved Angelus in her own way. He thought of me as a burden, and treated me accordingly.”

Buffy winced and looked away. The very absolute last thing she wanted to think about, ever, in her entire life, was anyone wearing Angel’s face doing anything remotely sexual to Spike; especially anything… disciplinary. There were really just things she never, ever wanted to consider about vampire family relations, in any aspect whatsoever. Especially when it came to vampires she had also slept with, and, just, no.

As if made aware by her flinch that he’d possibly gone a little overboard in the TMI aspect of things, Spike shrugged it off and swiftly changed the subject. “Been thinkin’ about what you shared about Harris, from the point of view of bein’ a fledge, actually. Of what it feels like when you first get your demon. How powerful you feel, and how little control you have. All that strength, just roaring through you. How wonderful it feels; like you’re on top of the world…”

/Huh. Maybe it’s…/ It sounded like being Called. 

Well Buffy remembered  _ that  _ moment, those first few heady weeks. The endless, surging vitality, the pounding, thrilling need to expend energy, in any and every way possible. The urge to fight that had transformed itself into a sudden crusader mentality separating her from her old socialite circle, driven by the need for action to step between bullies and their prey, if only to satisfy the insistent, inexorable and unending instinct to throw herself into combat. 

That part had never changed. She had simply adapted to it. And with it, the formless terror of wondering if it would take over her whole life; of having to relearn how to do everything. How not to break your mother with a hug or throw your best friends—or your biggest rivals—across the gym during a cheerleading exercise. How to hide that you could suddenly sprint across the football field in seconds in PE, how not to break a bully’s arm blocking a swing; and that mindless urge to fight  _ everyone _ and  _ everything _ . All that learning how  _ not _ to be a freak, when the need to be that which you had become, were born to be, was  _ all _ . The incredible  _ loneliness _ of it. /No nest, for me. No others. Except Faith, but we don’t get along like that. No one who understands but…/ 

Vampires. /Oh my  _ God _ ./

Which meant that maybe she could also understand, in a weird way…

“And when you’ve been at the bottom your whole life…” Spike went on, halted. His face twisted slightly, and he looked down into his open palms. “It’s not all about that lad Jesse, how much he hates us, Buffy, or it would only be vamps he hates. He doesn’t trust demons, because he doesn’t trust what the demon showed him about himself. He needs to blame demons for all of it, because if he believes it of himself, believes it was a part of who he was, too, what did that to you…”

Buffy bit her lip, understanding all too well, now. “Oh.” Shook her head hard in denial, even as it flooded her being. The problem was, she couldn’t run from that measured exposition. Not really, because it explained so much about Xander. “But… it’s got to be some kind of unconscious kneejerk thing, right, because he doesn’t remember?” He couldn’t, or he would have owned up, right? Apologized to her?

Azure eyes met hers, challenged everything to which she clung. “The lad remembers, luv. Whether he did at first and was lyin’—to himself, ‘cause he couldn’t bear it, or to all of you, for the same reason, that’s debatable—but he’s remembered since, and it’s drivin’ him mad, what he did to you. What he might’ve done, if you hadn’t stopped him.” The regret in Spike’s eyes was real; not as much for Xander as for what it might put her through to know it. “Now it’s out in the open, he’ll blame me for a bit, for makin’ you see it. He might run, if he can’t face you. It might even destroy him, to be faced with it. Havin’ it out in front of him like this, where he can’t hide from it.”

/Shit, shit, shit…/

A cool hand caught hers, squeezed it. “Or it might make things better between you, and for him. For the vengeance bird, as well, if he’s strong enough to face it all down, deal with it, forgive himself.” A short pause, then, “Lad might need a bit of help with that, though. Which might be the hell of a lot to ask from you, and I’m not tellin’ you to give it. Just lettin’ you know where I think all this hate’s comin’ from.”

Buffy bit her lip and looked away, because she honestly wasn’t sure where she fell on that line in this exact moment. Four days ago, no problem, but today? “Well, now I really can’t face him.” One thing to forgive someone for something that she had thought nowhere near his fault; a forgotten misdeed by something outside himself. Another thing entirely to forgive a remembered act done as much by a part of him that remained with them. Her friend. 

Spike snorted. “It’s not you should be worried, luv.”

Buffy groaned a little. “I need him to be focused on the battle, not running away when he sees me or freaking out.” /Ugh, like I needed more interpersonal crap to worry about./ “God, could I have picked a worse time to snap at him?”

A cool hand rose to chafe her tense shoulder bracingly. “The subject’s a bit raw for you at mo’, pet.”

It was. “Damn.”

Spike’s voice turned regretful. “Sorry about it, luv.”

/Well, crap./ Shooting him a swift glare, Buffy made with the weary tolerance. “It’s so not your fault.”

Her jollying earned her another squeeze to her shoulder. “Best be off, yeah?” he suggested quietly.

/Double-ugh./ “Yeah.” Suddenly she was uber-reluctant to go fight Hellions. “Let’s go kill things.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Well, at least she could take out her aggressions on something ugly.

Asshole demons, showing up to turn her life and her town and her brain and her friendships all upside-down. 

Not that she’d trade the Spike portion of festivities, but really, could these jerks be any more rude? /You’re  _ all _ goin’ down, busters./

***

The main goal was to lead the Hellions away from downtown and keep them away so they would quit with the pillage-loot-carnage routine. Also, having a spot where they could get the drop on the jerks would be a plus. Fairhaven and Twenty-Sixth would foot the bill, with Peaceful Meadows to the south with its long, tall wall and high gates, and on the east side, all those weird, perennially-empty condos lining Ruggs Field, and that little swale in the road that made that wall-thing on the west. It was better than nothing when it came to an ambush site. 

Also, there was that cool little bus stop right there with the huge lamppost right next to it, which was basically perfect for chaining up a captive demon.

“Okay,” Buffy announced as she swung out of the DeSoto into the growing dusk. “We ready?” She figured if she stuck with brisk, no-drama directness, there wouldn’t be time for Xander to flip out on her till after the fight.

No responses from the newly-arriving audience. With a short nod, she leaned into the back seat and dragged out their bound stool-pigeon, drove him stumbling backward against the concrete post. “Here. Enjoy your new home till your buddies show.”

Dome grunted painfully as she slammed him up against the thing with probably slightly excessive force, but she wasn’t all that interested in Hellion comfort at the moment. To her mind they had really done all they needed to do to keep the jerk cozy by bandaging his middle so he didn’t bleed to death on them and might remain more or less extant to be bait for his pals.

/Should probably be a little more careful with the bait, I guess/ she had to admit, when fresh dark blood bloomed on the gauze strapped around the demon’s torso over the tattered, stained shirt and vest. 

Oh well. 

Affixing the shackles once used on Spike—which, poetic justice, much?—Buffy shook them roughly to ensure they were secure, then turned back and gave her vampire a nod as he exited the DeSoto behind her. 

Spike nodded back grimly and slammed his door with slightly more force than strictly necessary. She saw him turn his head to survey the waiting Scoobies as he rounded the car to pop open the trunk, though his expression didn’t alter a whit as he wordlessly pulled out the three extinguishers they had gleaned at home. He merely handed her one, cradling the other two in the crooks of his elbows as he slammed the trunk shut even harder. He moved to flank her silently as she waited for her group to coalesce around the Citroen, each of them bearing their own collection of red cannisters. 

Wil had scavenged two from her parents’ home, and looked hopeful and determined with one large cylinder dangling from each hand and her satchel bulging with books and magicks supplies. Giles likewise carried his kitchen extinguisher and an armload of books as he ducked free from his tiny car, as well as a bagful of what looked like dried herbs and small candles. Anya carried one small extinguisher, probably also from Giles’ place, considering that where she lived probably wasn’t super well-stocked. She also kept darting speculative, suspicious glances in Xander’s direction, which Buffy might find worrying if she wasn’t prepared to deal with things before they got out of hand.

Had Anya… guessed? 

Buffy really hoped not. That girl was blunt like a butter knife. Or, more like a baseball bat. Not to mention still pretty vengeance-y, even if she no longer had her powers. Buffy wouldn’t put it past her to call in a favor or something, which was just… /No./ Not even if Xander remembered, like Spike thought he did.

/God, what if she’s already confronted him? Would she do that, when I haven’t had the chance yet?/ Because if she had, and Xander actually didn’t remember...

Xander had three extinguishers piled up in his arms. He had raided the hell out of his parents’ home. He also wore the most anxious, harried, guilty expression Buffy had ever seen on him, and his eyes were darting everywhere but her face. 

Well, crapsauce. Spike was right. He definitely remembered. Otherwise he would be all teed off and defensive and asking her what the heck her problem was, what her last comment had meant, or why she was acting so weird since she’d taken up with Spike, or… 

/Shoot. I’m gonna have to deal with this, aren’t I?/ 

Probably before the fight, too, or he wasn’t going to be very useful as a combatant. “Let’s, um, get set up. We can line up the extinguishers in relays, here and here, right? Then when they show we can be ready. Anya, can you and Spike do that to give Giles and Willow time to set up? I need, um, to talk to Xander for a sec.”

Xander jerked like he’d been shocked by a cattle prod, and turned a startling shade, like old putty. In the low light, he almost looked dead. /Oh, damn./

Spike touched Buffy lightly on the shoulder as he passed; a brief nudge of encouragement and approval, before heading on to join an intently-watching Anya in the extinguisher-stacking enterprise. Buffy nodded her gratitude, aware he’d notice even if he was walking away, then turned her attention on her old friend. 

Walking like a zombie, Xander set down his load, very carefully, in the pile next to the rest, though at the end they sort of tumbled from his wrists like his hands were numb. Then he stepped back, still not looking at Buffy. 

/Alright, none of that./ “Hey. C’mon, let’s step aside.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets and seemed to be doing his best to shrink, which was a tall order for a guy with such big shoulders. “Uh, okay,” he muttered uncertainly, and trailed her over to the margins of the road. 

There on the grassy verge, the mostly-empty condos looming a few feet away with their concrete porches and short driveways, and the rest of the team puttering around a good twenty feet to one side, Buffy sighed and squared up to the current task with as much willingness as she could muster. “So, I guess you actually do remember, after all.”

Xander didn’t answer. He did retreat into his shoulders like a turtle, hunching down like he could telescope his neck deeper and vanish. His arms went visibly taut from pockets to throat, and he made a sort of choked, gulping noise.

Yep, he definitely remembered. “How long?”

He mumbled something unintelligible, still not looking at her.

“Sorry, didn’t catch that.” Maybe she was being a little harsh, but sue her if she felt like she kind of deserved to know.

Xander flinched a little, muttered some more. This time Buffy made out a few words, among them, ‘right after’ and ‘couldn’t face you’.

/Oh. Oh shit./

Disappointment was swiftly followed by a sick sort of rage. She stuffed it all down with an effort, struggled to keep her voice even. “So, the whole ‘I don’t remember anything’ line was just a cover?”

Some sort of titanic struggle seemed to take place inside her friend’s bent frame, and then out of nowhere, he exploded. His head shot up, and he met her eyes, miserable and pleading and agonized. “I  _ lied _ , okay? I’m a big fat liar. I couldn’t deal with what I did, so I lied like I could pretend I could still be even remotely a decent friend to you ever again, and I’m the worst person in the world, alright? I’m dirt, and what can I even  _ say _ , Buffy, except it was the demon, and it was like I was trapped, and I couldn’t stop it, and it was like a nightmare every second, and…”

Buffy held up a hand to forestall the verbal diarrhea, since a lot of that was probably going to wind itself up into more self-justifying bullcrap. “And how much of that was because part of you wanted it, and that’s the part you can’t forgive yourself for? Because if that’s not how it went, I figure you’d maybe be over it by now.”

Xander stared at her for a moment, mouth hanging open, before he turned a sickly green color and swung away from her, fists held hard against his stomach. From that brief glimpse she’d gotten of his face she was pretty sure he was about to puke.

“I get how you could tell yourself that,” she told his back softly. “That it wasn’t you. That you would never actually act on any of that. But you have to admit that it’s somewhere in there. That it wasn’t all the demon; the same way that it is for vampires, or you wouldn’t be so mad about me and vamps.” 

His shoulders hunched harder, and he made a retching noise. 

_ Do you know how long... I've waited... until you'd stop pretending that we aren't attracted...  _ His voice rang in her memory, low and feral and terrifying, like it had been recorded in granite. It gave her the strength to push on. “How much of being mad that I’m attracted to vamps is because you’re mad that it wasn’t you, Xander? Either way?”

Stung, he whirled back to stare at her, bright spots of color on his cheeks as the pale and green mottling drained away. “Buffy, it’s not like that! I… You’re like my  _ sister _ now! My  _ hero! _ I…”

/Like someone in an action movie. Someone who never fails you. I get it now./ It burned, roiled in her stomach like acid. /And I did, right? Oh, how the mighty fall when I don’t behave the way you want me to, huh? Like some Xena Wonder Woman chick you could imagine might still date you someday or something. Not that you’re not a great guy, Xander, but that’s the problem./

/You’re  _ breakable _ . And I have to be responsible for what I do, or I’m just as bad as the bad guys./ “Your hero,” she interrupted him firmly, “but you don’t like that I have something in me that wants the monsters, the things that go bump in the night. You’d rather I go out with normal guys…”

It burst out of him, a froth of rage-fear. “Because it’s  _ safer! _ You have no  _ idea _ , Buffy, what it’s like…”

/So much you don’t know, Xan… because I never told any of you. Couldn’t admit it, even to myself./  _ You like your men dangerous. Dangerous and mean, right?  _

_ _ /No, not mean. Just a little more dangerous than human. And it isn’t about ‘like’… it’s about meeting me where I’m at. Because I’m dangerous too./ “I know, because I am one of the things that go bump in the night, just as much as I’m human. I can’t deny a whole part of myself to be with some human guy. And the thing about vampires is, they’re _like_ me. Human… and monster. I  _ need _ that.” She stepped closer, got right in Xander’s bubble the way he had done that day in the vending room. Let him really  _ feel _ the Slayer. Saw him recoil. Saw the fear in his eyes. Smelled it. /You think you could actually handle me, Xander?/ 

_ Come on, Slayer. I like it when you're scared. The more I scare you… the better you smell. _

Xander had tried to take something away from her. Jealous, resentful, he had attempted to steal her strength and make it his own. But she did not belong to him. /I belong to myself… and to whoever I give myself to if I choose to do that… but still always to me./

/I don’t belong to you just because you care. And I didn’t belong to you then because you wanted me./

Her eyes must have blazed. Xander backed up a step, out of her range, everything about him broadcasting discomfort at her aura of power; the thing she usually dimmed around her friends to play ‘normal human girl’. The unconscious play; something she never even thought about. When she turned on her Slayer-ness, it was for the baddies, and it was always pointed away from them. But not now. /And you know, don’t you, Xan? Faith didn’t turn it off when you were with her, did she? Did it scare you? Did it turn you on too? Did you get addicted, but you’re also afraid? Was that why you stopped chasing me?/ “It doesn’t scare me. Danger. Demons. That thing about smelling my fear?” 

He retreated another step. She let him, spread her arms wide as if to say, ‘This is what I am’. /I’m not holding back anymore, because finally, I don’t need to./ “There’s no fear, there, Xan. That’s the difference. For us, that’s not what it’s about.” She thought of her sister-Slayer, comatose now in the hospital because she had taken a gamble on her darker nature and lost the toss. Hadn’t reined it in enough; and that terrified Buffy too, but the answer… /It’s not to turn the other way, to run, to bury it, or I’ll just implode or something. I need to find a healthy outlet, or I’ll just end up like her. Like Faith./

/Maybe even worse./ “I’m just as much capable of being the bad guy as any of the monsters.” /Almost stepped over that edge. I’ve been so scared of it. That’s why Spike scared me for so long; but if he wants to join me here instead…/ “It’s what puts us on even ground. It’s why I can fight them. But with someone more breakable…” She shook her head, stepped back. “You were with Faith. You know how easy it is to lose control. And who it could hurt, if we’re not careful.”

Xander gaped at her, flummoxed by the comparison. “You’re not Faith.”

“No, I’m not.” But it was starting to occur to her how much they might be alike in some very key ways. “Which is why I’m with who I’m with.” No use denying it anymore. “The other side of the coin.” /Because without another side, what would I even be? Would I have any reason to exist? What is a coin, without two sides? And what is a Slayer without vampires?/

/God; who would I even  _ be, _ without Spike? He’s like my perfect opposite. If I didn’t have vamps, I wouldn’t be needed, really, and without  _ him _ …/

That old thing flickered in the back of her mind again, stirring restlessly as if made anxious by the very thought; something less domesticated than Buffy felt now. Something that had been there, occasionally, in the back of her mind since she had lain face-down in the shallow waters of a cave and Xander here had breathed life back into her body. Which was enough of a reminder to calm her, still the feral thing that lived in her lizard-brain and behind her mind. /I owe him this. I owe him time./ 

Disgust had briefly flickered over Xander’s face. “Buffy, you can’t trust him. You learned that before…”

Buffy held up a hand to forestall the returning diatribe. “I learned I couldn’t trust  _ you _ , but I did anyway.”

Arrested, he half turned away again, groaning. Buried his face in his hands. “Oh God…”

She couldn’t relent. Not yet. “But you’ve also saved my life, brought me back from the dead, stood by me through more dangers than I can count, listened to my heart and my fears. I’m choosing to focus on those things.” She caught his eye when he glanced back in a faltering way… and drilled it home. “I’ve done the same with him, Xander. It’s no different just because he still has his demon. He  _ has _ one. It isn’t  _ all _ he is. He’s not like Angelus, who threw away all of his humanity. And unlike Angelus, Spike loves me. So he gets the benefit of the doubt, just like Anya gets it even though she doesn’t regret anything about her life before being here.” /If you hear nothing else, hear this./ “And you don’t get to tell me who to love... or who to trust.” Time to lay it down in black and white. “Not  _ especially _ you.” 

The flinch this time was anguished. “Buffy…”

“No. We have a fight to get to. I forgive you, Xander. Hopefully you’ve forgiven me. I trust you again, and I’d think maybe you could extend me the same courtesy.”

“Buffy…” It came out in a whisper this time, as if she’d stolen his breath.

“Maybe you don’t,” she drove on, mercilessly, and tried not to care if that was the case; even if it hardly seemed fair. “…But I don’t have the time right now to argue about why you need to. We have work to do. We can fight about it later.” Motorcycle sounds had begun to coalesce, a growing buzz-rumble from over on twenty-fifth, approaching from the west. “You’re either with me or you’re not, but decide now.”

He stared at that, clearly taken aback. “I… What? I’m… I’m  _ always _ with you, Buff.”

“Good,” she answered, and turned back to the row of fire extinguishers. “Then let’s get to work. Because we have a whole grip of Hellions to put down.”

Chrome was catching streetlights as they came over the low rise from the cross-street at Dutton; a slow, glinting breaker, lit to sparkling in the oncoming night. Vanishing in the shallow dip at Ericson, only to crest again when they passed Soledad…

Dome, over to one side against his pillar, was hissing and struggling now. “You said you’d scrag me!” he whined. “You said…”

Buffy ignored him, watched as row upon row of motorcycles broke over the low slope to cross just north of them, made the wide turn… and joined them there where they waited at Twenty-Sixth. They gathered in a roaring, thrumming multitude, bristling with wrath and villainy, all stretched faces and long ears and metallic implants and sneers; arcane, inked designs and filthy, road-dusted, sweaty leather, pointed teeth and sparse, lank, snarled hair. 

A rabble. Her team would  _ end _ them.

“You ready?” she asked Spike. She had no need of looking to know he had stationed himself once more near to hand.

“Oh so bloody ready, love,” he answered, and she heard leather rustle and creak as he took up a fighting stance; as his fists tightened around the extinguisher he held in one fist. 

“Wil? Giles? You guys set?”

“As we’ll ever be,” Giles called back flatly. “I’ll begin the chant, Willow, but not till you’ve made the necessary offering.”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure. Of course. Just… not till they’re within about, what? Twenty feet? Does that sound good?”

“That ought to do nicely.”

“That’s gonna cut it close, isn’t it?” Xander asked anxiously, jittering where he stood.

The gleaming row of death-machines had halted, lined up opposite them and maybe sixty feet away, as if waiting for a signal to charge. It was like looking down the mouth of thrumming, idling doom. Something in Buffy’s cells seemed to recognize this moment; like a thing from an ancient past. Two opposing impulses screamed inside her lizard-brain, one telling her to run for her life before they could come on and crush her… and one telling her to do the insane thing. To face them down, become some kind of nutso berserker and just run head-on into that wall of death. To scream and rush teeth-first into their line, leap onto one of them, get them before they got her. Before they could run her over. 

/No. This ends now./ Buffy opened the valve on her extinguisher, her eyes never leaving the serried ranks of the enemy. /We stand. And we take them  _ down _ ./

/This is  _ our _ town./ “We’re gonna kick their asses.” She lifted her chin, raised her voice to be heard above the idling engines. “Hey, Razor! You want your boy back? Come and get him.”

Razor’s face split into a wide, merciless crack of a thing that might have been a grin. “Didn’t come for Dome. Told you, the boy’s damaged goods. Came to gut you, Princess.”

Buffy shrugged nonchalantly, thumb poised on the lever of her weapon. “I don’t see you moving. Do you want to get this show on the road, or are you just gonna sit there?” She tilted her head guilelessly. “Or are you waiting for me to come over there and show your boys you’re just a giant coward at heart?” She smiled sweetly. “I guess that makes sense. You know, if you don’t have the upper hand, and it’s not a bunch of scared civvies in a bar somewhere.” She half-turned toward Spike, aware this would be the final straw. “You got any liquid courage on you for these poor babies, honey?”

The cracked expression disappeared, morphed into insane, narrow-eyed rage, and the lead Hellion flexed his arm. His hand cranked, his Harley revved. “C’mon, boys. Let’s ride ‘em down.” The enraged voice dialed down to something poisonously lethal. “But leave the whore. She’s  _ mine _ .”

“Ready?” Buffy hissed to her three flankers as the wave broke.

“Ready,” Anya answered grimly from Spike’s left. “Though I’m really not entirely sure why I signed on for this without my amulet…”

“Hell yes,” Spike breathed, as always at Buffy’s left hand. 

“With you,” Xander answered, sounding pale but determined from Buffy’s right.

“Probably because I truly despise these guys, and if I can wreak any vengeance against them, even in this idiotic form, I’ll do it, but it’s just so  _ frustrating!” _

Anya’s nervous yammering was broken, thank goodness, by the low chanting from behind; a magickal counterpoint which carried on uninterrupted. Even in such a crisis, Giles could be counted on to keep his head; like a rock in a storm.

It must be said, however that her Watcher’s voice did take on an urgent, almost harried note as the rumbling intensified. 

“Are you sure this is gonna work?” Willow squeaked, sounding intimidated as hell. “I scatter the leaves just so on the soil, that the ground may buckle and break…”

“Oh, no worries, Red,” Spike answered grimly. “It’ll work.”

It had better, because they were here. Now.

Buffy lifted her ‘weapon’ and inhaled, planting her feet. The wave had reached them, crested. Razor and a couple of his buddies had even reared up on their back tires to come at them all intimidatingly as they closed; nine or so stretched-out feet of chopper roaring overhead as they popped their spiked wheelies. 

Buffy had been battling things bigger, heavier, taller and stronger than herself since she was fifteen. Consequently she kept her head, dodged smoothly to one side, held out her extinguisher hose, and sought the part of the motorcycle Spike had described to them all, the part Wil had pulled up on her computer to show them, using Mom’s internet deal.  _ “If we knock out the air intakes,” _ he’d informed them while Mom was still coming back from turning on the router,  _ “it’ll take ‘em out without too much trouble.”  _ A little, acknowledging touch to Buffy’s arm. _ “And we both know vengeance chit is right; they’re the hell of a lot easier to fight on foot, these ones. ‘Specially once you and Watcher do your mojo, Red.” _

_ “The… The air intakes? While we…” _

_ “Yeah. Their engines’ll cut out on ‘em all sudden-like; an’ let me tell you. It’s a shite deal to have that happen when you’re going full-bore an’ tryin’ to concentrate on a fight. Then they’ll be too busy tryin’ to stay upright to manage if you an’ Watcher pull the proverbial rug out from under ‘em by tuggin’ the Macadam about a bit. So, better focus.” _

_ “Yeah. Sure. Focus. On a spell. While all of you, um…”  _

_ “Good Lord; you want Willow and I to produce a small, localized earthquake while the rest of you dance about spraying the air-intakes of a load of motorbikes with… what, exactly, Spike?” _ Giles had sounded alarmed as hell.

Spike had turned to Buffy, grinning.  _ “Got any fire extinguishers about, pet?” _

_ “What?” _ She had been busy worrying over the very concept of trying to keep her footing on uneven ground while facing down Hellions armed with who-knew-what, and had gotten a little lost. It had made for a hard time following the conversation.

_ “Good thing to have about, if you’re gonna keep me about as well. Case I set myself alight with a fag.” _ He’d lifted out a cigarette, twiddled it between his fingers, put it away again with a devilish grin.  _ “And, they’re good for cocking up an air intake.” _

/Buh?/ _ “How?”  _

_ “How they work, innit? Choke away all the bloody oxygen. Interrupt the airflow for even a minute, and what happens to an engine as depends on fire to get on with things?” _

_ “Oh.” _ Buffy had blinked, amazed at this insight.  _ “Oh!” _

_ “Oh, dear Lord,” _ Giles had muttered from his seat. 

The plan, however, seemed to be working quite well so far. Bless Spike and his motorcycle-knowhow (or maybe his engine-disabling skills), gleaned from who knew where and when (and she definitely didn’t want to know). /I just need to be able to recognize it. It should be between the two tilty-things. The part shaped like a vee on this one, or maybe shaped like… Well, either way, it’s gonna have those lines, and a grill inside, and…/

She found it, like a bolt of startling, slow-motion clarity in the celerity of the moment. Aimed her hose… and cranked down hard on the lever of her heavy cannister. 

_ “Won’t need a lot, love. Just a few gouts should do it. Don’t empty the whole bloody thing on one bike, as we’ll need to save it for the next one. And the next.” _

/Right./

Spinning away, Buffy ducked a blow and let the already-tottering, coughing behemoth chug on behind her to face the next rank of the oncoming steel wave.

Somewhere off to the left, under the bus shelter by Dome, Wil and Giles fumbled with books and herbs and chants, fighting to get their mini-earthquake together. Buffy could hear only snatches of their work over the roaring in her ears, the roaring of the motorcycles, the roaring of battle.  _ “…Et tamquam aperto maris in terra volumine…” _

“…To Gaia I call! Let this soil turn beneath our feet, let it roil, as the open sea; in this place where our bodies stand, in combers free!” 

Spike was somewhere off to Buffy’s left, a row of bikes between them. That seemed wrong, somehow. He could be in trouble, one of them could snatch him up like before… 

/No, he can fight for himself now./ He’d been all swaggering self-confidence again, a minute ago, ready to get his own back. 

But was it put on, for her sake, to back her?

She would see him if she took out this one, then jumped the guy behind her and…

/No/ she reminded herself grimly. /Stick to business. Don’t let my row get through. If this is going to work with us I need to have faith, let him stand on his own. He’ll hate me if I’m always trying to protect him, I’ll end up resenting him for distracting me, making me weak, and he’ll feel like he’s a burden or something. I need to focus and just accept that…/

Accept that he was like all the rest of her people, and she could lose him at any moment. /Even though I was ready to give up everything for him./ That was the terrifying part. She had been so tired of dissension in the ranks that she had been willing to walk away from the entire exhausting mess for the simplicity that was him, and what they had been building together. For that thing that had crystalized in that motel room, unspoken. To lose that, now, and descend back into chaos once more was anathema. /And I have to face that it’s possible. It’s always possible, living this life, this Calling. As long as I have someone I can’t stand to lose… like Angel, like Mom, like Wil or Xan or Giles or Spike… this is gonna be harder./ Angel just put it all into perspective for her; made it worse, because now she knew for sure what it felt like to sacrifice. She didn’t know if she could ever do it again, if it came to that. /It almost killed me. If there’s a next time…/ 

Next time, she would rather it be herself. She would rather leave the world with her loved ones intact than live in it again having sacrificed any one person she loved to save it. 

/But that’s  _ not _ today!/ 

Clenching her jaw, grinding her teeth, Buffy swung determinedly on the next oncoming motorcycle. It was different; not a Harley. God knew what kind, but that didn’t matter. She found the air thingy after a split-second’s perusal, opened up to foam it to smithereens, spun to look for a new target. Behind her she heard the horrible clatter of the first bike hitting the asphalt.

No more were coming on, so she swung, cylinder upheld like a battering ram, sword swinging at her hip. “Let’s see how you bastards like fighting on foot!” she challenged the leader as he resolved from the wreckage of his chrome monster and stood, livid and snarling.

Razor growled; a hideous, rattling noise. He was hunched a little over that gash Spike had earlier placed in his abdomen, he had road-rash all up one side of his metal-bound face, and his right ear was ground down to a ragged nub. A little worse for wear. “You bitch. What the fuck did you do to my mule?”

“I put it down. What? Scared to fight me face to face without your precious advantage?”

“I’m gonna rip your guts out and stuff ‘em down your…”

Buffy yawned theatrically. “You know, I’ve been hearing crap like that since I was a freshman. It gets old. Can we just skip ahead to the part where I kill you?” She shrugged a little and threw the still-heavy extinguisher directly into his face. “I have homework.”

The half-expended device struck the Hellions’ leader smack between the eyes. He swung to bat it away a little belatedly and dove at her all clumsily, spitting and howling. 

...And staggered as the ground beneath his feet abruptly folded up in a vast ripple, rolled like a slow, shrugging comber coming in to land, and broke in Buffy’s direction.

Drawing her sword, Buffy braced herself. /Here we go!/

Even with warning, she almost lost her footing as well. All around her, downed motorcycles swiveled and juddered and bounced, and landed Hellions—and not a few Scoobies—tottered around on the abruptly-uneven street. It was wild to watch the way it rippled; kind of like a ribbon being fluttered in one of Buffy’s gymnastics classes when she was six and learning floor routines for the first time. Really rather pretty; or would have been, if it weren’t for the bodies. 

Dodging the last of his prey, Spike neatly leapt a falling bike to come to her side. “That’s just lovely,” he told her, grinning, and spread his hands as if taking in the devastation of chrome corpses littering the battlefield. “Now I see why you lot always win. You cheat so beautifully.”

The way he was looking at her took her breath. “Hey, it’s not cheating, it’s exploiting an advantage. And anyway, it was half your ide…  _ Duck!” _ she screamed, and yanked him down hard.

The Hellion who had come off the bike behind him had just damn near taken his head. He would have dusted in front of her. He would have…

Her stomach was empty with sudden terror, her sword out in front of her before she could think. She shoved Spike aside to leap almost  _ over _ him while he was still coming out of his stoop; screaming, feral. She had that tunnel-vision thing happening again; couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything, and the ground was still rippling. The wave had come back the other direction, and she staggered, but she barely noticed. She was outside herself. The Hellion rearing up before her was headless already. She found another, stalked toward it over the bobbing ground, implacable; death incarnate. Took it down, set her sights on more. There were always more. 

Time ceased to be a matter of interest or accounting. Her body did its work. There was nothing to be known but that she must soon close with the one who led the enemy. Found it finally; snarling, all teeth and slavering inanity. She would destroy it for coming to her place, for harming what was hers. She would…

And then her mate had her by the arm, was  _ holding her back _ , which made no sense, and she would chastise him for that transgression later, but first she must abolish the one who had attempted to take her territory. She would tear it limb from limb for damaging those under her protection, she would… “Buffy. Buffy, love, come back! Look!”

Disoriented, the Slayer shook her head, fought to get her bearings. And saw still others entering into the field; marching in in dark-clothed ranks, wearing a strange armor and bearing odd weapons, to take part in her battle. Those others, then, who had encroached long on her territory, and wished to defend it also, but who were doing it in the incorrect manner, and who had damaged her mate. She did not want them. She would someday have to fight them. Perhaps not today, but…

“By order of the US Military, you are asked to stand down. We’ll take over from here.”

The Slayer shook her head slightly, uncertain how to make sense of the words. It was almost as if these ones thought the territory was theirs, and they could give her orders on her own hellmouth. Foolish. They would be taught the way of things.

Absently, she drove her weapon into the throat of a demon as it attempted, blearily, to rise behind her, and tilted her head to watch the incoming troops. Her response would be predicated on their next move.

“Buffy…” 

Her mate was made nervous, of course, by their approach. Understandable. These ones had spoiled him, rendered him a broken hunter, made it so that he could not defend himself against such as they. He remained a formidable fighter, a match for her in all ways, and she would keep him; for now their missions could be married. Yet, it was unacceptable that these interlopers might further incapacitate her chosen, and render him less than she. 

No. He would be preserved. 

Reaching out without thought or the need for sight, the Slayer touched him just so with the hand he protected, on the features which guarded his other face. He must keep himself hidden. She would hold him safe, until he could be restored.

He slid behind her a little, and ceased breathing. 

It was acceptable. She would place herself between them. None would take him from her.

“You’ve been ordered to stand down.”

The Slayer shook her head slightly, frowning. Their words made little sense. 

“Oh, man…” One of the Slayer’s compatriots, the young male, stepped forward resolutely. “Look. Ooyah and everything, I don’t think that’s gonna be happening, boys. You have no idea what you’re getting yourselves into.”

“By order of the US Military…” 

The earth shrugged. The Slayer stood her ground with ease, as if balancing on the back of a bucking horse. The strangely-clad humans on the far side of the arena had a more difficult time maintaining their footing. There were murmurs of earthquakes, made in incredulous tones, as if this were an unexpected development. 

Snarling and confused, the leader of the once-mounted demons swiveled its head; first at the Slayer, then at the interlopers. Forward, back again. Glared undying hatred at her and hers, for his compatriots lying in their dark blood on the field of battle; a round half-dozen incapacitated or reft of life. Sneered at the black-clad soldiery amassed across its retreat zone to box it in. “Who the fuck  _ are _ you?”

The soldier did not address the demon. “Please. Stand down. We don’t want any more civilian casualties. We are tasked with subduing the threat of these… insane bikers. We’ll take it from here… miss.”

The Slayer cocked her head once more to eye the speaker with interest. There was something strained and oddly familiar about his voice, but she could not place it in this context. 

“Hey!” her female co-combatant called abruptly. “Wait! Oh Goddess! Is that Riley? Riley Finn! Buffy, I think that’s Riley Finn!” 

The Slayer frowned, fighting to place the appellation. It meant nothing to her in the moment. Her witch seemed to think it was of import, however, so she kept her eyes trained on the soldier in the lead. Perhaps he was a dangerous opponent.

“Willow!” the elder male exclaimed, his voice strained.

The magicks animating the soil beneath the Slayer’s feet abruptly ceased. The misplaced combers failed, and the ground settled to somnolence. All around them stabilized, reality reasserting itself. 

The strained voice picked up again, sounding even more so, now. “You’d be ill-advised to continue engaging with the hostiles. Please stand back. We are ordered to proceed with our scheduled operation.” And the black-clad soldiery began to close the human net around the demons at a circling quickstep.

The leader of the demon invaders hissed. Moved into a tightening bunch, back-to-back with its dwindling pack. Snarled when the first of its kind, on the outer edges of the group, fell victim to some odd lightning jolting from the ends of the weapons held by the strange soldiers. 

“Oh, Christ, Buffy…” the Slayer’s mate moaned from behind her. “Let’s get the bloody hell out of here, yeah?”

“Gates, Miller, Moran, bag ‘em! Dean, Evert, Jones, Randall, stay on the guns!”

Five more of the demons were down in swift succession, captured by the armed strangers. The tightening black noose was closing on the Slayer’s position. And at the core of that noose, the demon leader hunched around its wound beside a half-dozen or so of his followers, hunted and cornered and ferocious.

They had nowhere else to go. They would come to her. The Slayer braced herself. 

Behind her, reading her body as was his wont and right to do, her mate did the same. Oddly, the remainder of her group remained still as if bewildered. Unprepared. Had they no combat experience, no senses?

Breaking, the trammeled demons dashed for the Slayer and her people. 

Whether her team were or not, the Slayer and her mate were ready. Her compatriots rallied without delay, however. They were trained that well at least; thus the demons broke around her and hers like the sea on rocks. Two more were downed with swift economy as they passed. 

Unfortunately, the rest streamed by; five or so and the leader, to vanish to all sides, pelting down the lane toward the dubious freedom of a world without mounts or weapons. 

The Slayer and her party were left bereft of combatants, staring across the rumpled, littered field at the soldiers and their netted captives and wondering what might be their next move.

The lead soldier stared back at the Slayer, seemingly at a loss. After a moment one of his fellows elbowed him, and he came out of his stasis. “Move out!” he barked. “We’ll mop up later!” 

The Slayer watched quizzically as the interlopers grabbed up their catch and disengaged, backing slowly from the field of battle. These ones would be a problem, she decided. They interfered when they were not wanted. They did not destroy demons cleanly in combat. They had other designs; unsavory ones. Ones that might, in the end, possibly threaten even the Slayer herself.

The had made of themselves an ambivalent foe, and no longer among those she must protect. They had taken that onus upon themselves, and were no longer hers. 

They must be dealt with.

Later, though. For now, they had already melted into the darkness with their spoils. 

Turning, the Slayer approached the babbling captive which remained, tied to the post at the wayside. “You said you’d do me! You said you’d…”

She drove her sword directly into the thing’s center. It sagged with a low, wheezing exhale. It sounded relieved.

“Oh my God, Buffy.”

“It was no longer useful.” The words, the language, sounded alien on her tongue. They had the right sense to them, though.

Cool hands caught her shoulders, spun her. Dragged at her bloodied hands, yanked her close. Cupped her face, brought her eyes up… and she was pulled in, was made captive by a gaze like a summer sky in late evening. Indigo in the night, but lit by the odd lamplight, they gleamed with devotion. “Buffy. Slayer. Come on back, yeah? They’re gone. We’re all alright. And we’ve got to figure out our next move.”

She shook her head, confused. There had to be something left to fight. Her territory was in shambles. The world was upside down. Everything was…

She was crushed up close against a firm body, known among all others. And a hard, fierce, giving kiss was rained upon her mouth.

She found herself lost to it, heard nothing, felt nothing else. Not the murmurs of shock around them, not the oncoming chill of night. Her body was alight, and she was most definitely in it again. Crash-landing. A hard one. /Boy-howdy./

When Spike pulled away, looked into her eyes once more, Buffy blinked. Smiled shyly, a little uncertain and more than a little embarrassed, but in no way caring at the moment about anyone watching. “I’m not sure what just happened.”

Spike smiled back, brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. “Neither am I, love, but you were bloody brilliant, you.” 

“I was?”

“Yeah. Scared the shite out of me.” He lowered his forehead to hers, rocked it a little from side to side. “Remind me never to brass you off again. Terrifying chit.”

/He knows what I really am. He always has. Here… and when we’re alone and I can fall apart over it after. He can handle all of it. I don’t scare him, and he doesn’t resent it. He still wants me./

Just like that, Buffy found herself back on an even keel. “What? You don’t like me all crazy and dangerous?” 

There was a sudden, telltale bulge against her hip that said maybe he kind of did. “That, we’ll  _ definitely _ have to discuss at a later date, pet.”

Somewhere off to one side, Xander’s voice drifted through the night. “Wil, remember that thing where you made Giles blind? Can we revisit that?”

“Yes, it was rather useful, wasn’t it?” Giles.

“I’m pretty tired, but I might just make us all blind as soon as I recover…”

“You all are really a lot of prudes, you know that? After the other day I kind of wondered how long this would take. I’m sure they’ll give each other many orgasms. If they haven’t already…”

Spike snorted. 

/If there is a God…/

“Ahn, I’m begging you to never say anything like that,  _ ever _ again…”

Buffy had stopped listening to the protesters’ gallery. She was looking at Spike looking at her, eyes lambent in the lamplight. Feeling him thrum all along her skin, and... Alright. At some point there were just going to be one too many battles, and she was going to lose her damn mind and jump on him right in the middle of one, and everyone was just going to have to deal with it.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
So... the first time around I just plain forgot to add a "translation" of my garbagey Google "Latin" Willow-invisibility spells, because I was forgetful. This time around I didn't translate Giles because Willow basically says the same thing in English right next to him.  
  
So. *EVEG* Home stretch now!!! Four chapters to go!!! Now that we're head-to-head against Captain Cardboard and the Idiot Brigade, let's see where we can go in four chapters. HEE, any predictions? And not just because i'll probably find them terribly entertaining, but because I might wink and/or nod if folks are on the right track. But only if you want that sort of thing. (If not, safeword at me before you start predictifying.)


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy quarantine!  
Just a quick note to this one; I added quite a bit after beta, so any mistakes are mine.   
Any resemblance to being under government supervision for your own protection due to dangerous threats is just a bad metaphor i'm making because I started a new med, so ignore me.

“So was that, um… really  _ Riley?” _

“Yeah,” Willow murmured back, sounding equally stunned in retrospect. “I really think it was.”

“Wow. Just wow.” 

Buffy sat back and just shook her head. She still felt a little emotionally distant from the events of the previous hour. Mostly, the battle had left her with a sense of disjointed confusion. As the impressions came percolating slowly back in, she found herself shaken and a little alarmed by the way she had been… what? Taken over? Who even knew? 

The only thing she was sure of was that it had happened once before, in that motel room when she had found Spike being… abused. She had  _ dismantled _ that first Hellion in there without thought or compunction, had helped Spike take his vengeance on the second without the slightest emotional response. She had been death incarnate; and that same thing had happened again, here, tonight. 

The common denominator seemed to be seeing her vampire in jeopardy. Which was interesting, she supposed, or would have been, if she wanted to examine things any more closely. Really, she just wanted to stay close to Spike, reassure herself that he was alright; that he was solid and uninjured and with her. Because that was what had brought her back, put her back in control of her body. He had touched her and spoken to her and let her know in no uncertain, very physical terms, that he was safe and beside her still.

“Obviously he works with these commandos, no matter how crazy that sounds. Sorry, Buff,” Xander muttered, half-turning to her. He shrugged a little, eyes downcast. “You never seem to catch a break, do you. On the ‘dating a regular joe’ thing…”

It took Buffy a second to realize that Xander was still talking about Riley Finn. When she did, she rolled her eyes, wondering what the hell her friend was even babbling about. That date with the Psych TA (and, rando soldier?) had happened four days and, like, a lifetime ago at this point. Her entire world had altered since then. Riley was less than a blip on her radar anymore, so it hardly mattered that the jerk had lied and was part of some weird, secret government group doing demon-experiments somewhere on campus. Or, no more than it mattered in a general sense that there was a clandestine group of commandos capturing supernatural creatures in and around her college, which in the life of Buffy? Pretty standard fare. “Okay? Like that’s new for me? And also, I kind of had that figured out a while ago. But thanks for stating the obvious, Xan.”

Xander shrugged. “I just thought…” He shook his head. “Never mind.”

It percolated finally, what he actually meant, and Buffy felt her lips tighten. /You thought you could push me toward ‘the normal guy’. The guy who’s kind of like you hope you can be, the guy you hope you really are somewhere in there. Not who you’re scared you are, deep inside. Someone you could approve of, like you’re paying your debt to me or something. Like you’d be helping to ‘keep me protected’ from the demons who might hurt me the way you tried to, if you could make me ‘safe’ by forcing me into some ‘Xander-approved’ human relationship./ 

Ugh. The high-handedness in the name of loving her was sometimes just so…

It was time for a subject change before she got very, very upset once more. “Anyway,” Buffy drove on fiercely, “what I wanna know is, what the hell do these jerks have planned for the demons we were gonna kill? Because whatever it was, it can’t be good.” Feeling petulant, she held back the urge to punch something. There was nothing really around here to hit, anyway. Giles’ apartment was sadly lacking in punchables. “Stupid strategy-wrecking commandos.” 

“‘The best laid plans of mice and men’,” Spike murmured, and stroked her shoulder soothingly.

“‘Gang aft agley’,” Giles finished in a soft voice, and then his head jerked up, and his eyes narrowed as he gazed at Spike with a strange, assessing expression on his face.

Spike grimaced and tore his gaze away to resettle it on Buffy. “We’ll get it sorted, pet.”

“What’s an ‘agley’, and why is it going after someone’s gang?” Xander demanded, frowning.

/My question. Except, I didn’t want to sound stupid. Glad you’re here to do it for me, Xan./

“It means no matter how well you’ve organized a thing, it can often go awry,” Giles muttered, and adjusted his glasses.

Buffy made a face. “That’s why we always have to be ready to chop and change. Okay.” Sitting up straighter, she exhaled in exasperation and leaned forward. “I guess these commando jerks feel like they own the place or something, and the Hellions stung them too, the way they took over. Though, they’re kinda late to the party if that’s the case. Obviously their orders were to take ‘samples’ or whatever, though God knows what they plan to do to ‘em once they get ‘em to their lab thingy…”

“Cut ‘em up,” Spike broke in grimly. At all their startled looks, he grunted. “‘S what they do, yeah? Find a new species of demon, experiment on ‘em, see what makes ‘em tick. Find their weaknesses, exploit ‘em. Turn ‘em loose again once they know how to control ‘em…”

Giles leaned forward, abruptly intensely interested. “That’s more than you’ve said in the past week about these military sorts. Why are you so chatty all of a sudden, Spike?” He sounded thoroughly suspicious. 

“Told you, Watcher. Be a bit nicer to me and I’ll talk.” His fingers tickled Buffy’s shoulder as he stroked lightly, absently at the spot where her blouse sleeve ended at bare skin. 

Giles’ expression went very suddenly stony. “I hardly think it’s appropriate to be as kind to a captive enemy informant as you seem to think.” His words cut off very sharply, but they were cold as ice. 

/Oh my God; for  _ real _ , Giles?/

Spike had a point, though. Mom had always been pleasant to him, and in return he had bent over backward to be a relative sweetheart to her; practically as close to a gentleman as his vampiric nature had allowed. When he had thrown himself on their mercies, however—the so-called ‘good guys’, the ones who should have risen above their petty hatred of all he stood for to do the right thing—they had in turn used him as a volunteer punching bag upon which to vent their hatred of his kind, his particular species, and the sire of his line who had so damaged them all. 

/And me. I specifically taunted and teased him, starved him while I ate a feast in front of him—such a ‘good guy’—hated him for making me want him… and then did it harder after the spell, because I knew for sure, then. Knew he wasn’t as ‘disgusting’ as he was supposed to be, that there was a difference between ‘actually evil through and through’ and ‘raised to be evil chaos-boy’… And, man. That whole ‘she protests too much’ deal is  _ real _ , huh?/

Because, damn it, she had wanted the hell out of unabashed chaos boy with a dash of violence. Knowing that Spike could shed the impulse to sheer evil in which he had been raised by Angelus, like a hair shirt, if it suited his needs… That was even more unutterably sexy to her than his general impulsive, loyal ferocity, and that was saying something. “Giles.” Buffy was done with all the weird backtalk and nonsense. It would have to keep till after this fight was over. She had made her choice, damn it, and they were all going to have to deal. /My friends, my work, Spike, me; all of it. Later./ “Spike, Anya; do you think Razor will try to break in and rescue his guys?”

Put on the spot, the current and former demons took the question with the gravity with which it had been posed. Exchanged glances. Anya took up the baton first. “They don’t have their motorcycles anymore, but they might risk going back for the ones they left behind, or maybe find more. And anyway, who knows if they can use them where these soldiers are based. It’s not their first choice for types of combat, and they’ve taken a hard hit to their confidence. But… camaraderie is their watchword, so I’d say… fifty-fifty?” Her eyes touched Spike’s, and she shrugged uncertainly.

“Yeah, even odds.”

“If they can even find the commando lair, that is.”

Spike’s mouth twisted.  _ “I _ might not even be able to find the bloody thing again. Christ knows I’ve tried.” He shook his head. “Not that I particularly want to put myself back in the tossers’ hands, or that I’m so bloody fond of the Hellions that I want to save ‘em if they decided to go in there and give themselves up, yeah? Serve the whole bloody lot of ‘em right if they wanted to go down there like a load of sacrificial ninnies….”

Buffy’s hand found Spike’s, and she squeezed it. “It could give us answers about what those soldiers did to you.”

Spike tensed, turning the consistency of a boulder. His head swiveled very slowly till he was facing her in three-quarter profile. It was the only part of him that moved. “That sodding place scares the fuck out of me, Slayer,” he whispered. 

Buffy turned to him without conscious volition, as if he were a magnet and she were an iron filing. “You know you’re safe,” she whispered back. “I won’t let anyone take you from me.” Her hand tightened on his, involuntary and fierce. “I don’t even think I have a choice about it. What happened out there… It just… happened. Just like the first time.” She felt a little laugh bubble up in spite of herself; slightly harried, a little off-kilter. “I’m pretty sure I couldn’t even speak English anymore, but I for damn sure knew no one was gonna touch you and live.”

He let out a breath, managed a smile. “Glad I can inspire you to be so bleedin’ impressive, love.” His eyes were riveted on her, and he sounded awed. “My warrior queen.”

Buffy snorted. “Warrior cavewoman. I felt very ‘beer-bad’ about it, for a while there.”

“Very what?”

“Wait,” Xander exclaimed, interrupting with slightly less cynicism in his voice than expected, considering their poses. “You went all ‘cave-Buffy’ again during the fight?”

Buffy shrugged and pushed away from Spike a little. “Not exactly. I felt something… I dunno. Really primitive take over my brain when I saw Spike in danger.” She felt that anxious stirring deep inside her, shifted uneasily in automatic response. “Like some old thing I’ve never met took over my brain, started running my body for me. Something without words.” She tried hard to shrug it off. “It’s not the first time it’s happened. It, uh, happened a few days ago, too when he was… um, attacked…”

Giles sat back abruptly, looking daunted and a little horrified.  _ “Awon lodi ti Olugbeja akoko _ .”   
“Um, okay?”

Giles turned his gaze slowly back to Buffy’s, but he seemed not to be looking at her, particularly. His thoughts seemed distant, as if he were studying something far off over her left shoulder, between her and Spike. “The essence of the Original Defender.”

Buffy worked through that for a moment, came to the obvious conclusion. “The First Slayer?”

Giles’ eyes sharpened behind his glasses, as if taking her in for the first time. “There have been accounts, Buffy, of Slayers having been… overtaken by the spirit of the Line when the essence has deemed it necessary, in defense of some vastly important ideal or territory, or in the name of a fight which was, at the time, endgame. An apocalyptic contest, or a battle which seemed otherwise pyrrhic or impossible. There are, in fact, meditative techniques by which a Slayer can bring about contact with the essence of Sineya…”

“Sineya?”

“The First Slayer. To seek guidance in the Slayer-Dreamscape. To invite her to take part in the current fight. However, without the traditional sort of training, which you, of course, have eschewed, I hadn’t thought it likely that you would ever be visited by…”

He trailed off, sounding bemused and, Buffy thought, slightly offended. “Maybe it takes the right trigger?” she asked sweetly.

His careworn visage twisted.

Beside Buffy, Spike rumbled a little; a tiny, subterranean noise she knew very well. It was the sound of her vampire fighting to restrain a snarky chuckle; usually at her expense, because he wanted to keep his head where it was. This time he was withholding probably mostly because he was enjoying watching the undercurrents and didn’t want to screw them up by inserting himself.

Buffy elbowed him lightly in the ribs to shut him up. He wasn’t helping. “You could’ve told me,” she informed her Watcher irritably. “You know, that some ancient Ancestress could come along at any time to take me over like some… weird Slayer-y possession when I needed a boost…”

“I honestly had no idea it could happen without the proper training.”

Buffy frowned. “So you kept me in the dark.”

Giles narrowed his eyes at her, just this side of accusing. “Since when are you at all interested in ancient Slayer lore, Buffy?” he demanded.

Alright, he had her there. But if there might be something in said ancient lore that might explain her connection with vampires—and, in particular, this one vampire, why her primitive inner self was so in tune with one in a… a ‘mate’-y sense—then color her suddenly interested in doing her Slayer homework. “You might catch me hitting the books a little more diligently here soon,” she told her Watcher quietly. “I mean, as soon as I finish finals. I’ll hit you up around Christmas break.”

Giles straightened at that, looking surprised and abruptly gratified. His eyes flickered to Spike and back again, and his mouth tightened in that way that said he was pleased and didn’t want to be; like he was all teed off at the source of the thing that had pleasantly surprised him. “Well, that would be quite acceptable, Buffy. I’d very much enjoy shepherding you through some deeper studies as to your Calling, of course, while you have the leisure...”

“It’s a date. Later.” She sighed heavily. “After we deal with these commando jerks and what’s left of our motorcycle mayhem issue. So.” She turned back to her vampire. “You think you can find the way in if you really think about it? Maybe do some meditating of your own? Because I gotta say; all this talk about catch-and-release of demons like the Hellions isn’t filling me with confidence. Especially since we don’t have any idea what these guys’ angle is.”

Spike’s mouth flattened into a thin line. “I’d walk through fire for you, Slayer, and you know it. But this is asking a whole bloody lot.”

“I know,” she whispered, and covered his hand with hers. “Just try?”

He nodded and let out a breath. “Right, then. For you, Buffy.”

/Not for the town, not for himself even. But for me./

It was a heavy thing to carry, but it was hers, and she would carry it. For that look in his eyes, and for the keeping of him, she would carry it.

***

“I’m not sure how I got talked into this. I mean, I’m not going to be any good in this fight.”

Anya’s voice trailed them in the dark of campus, followed by Xander’s. “You were great in the last fight, Ahn.”

Anya hesitated audibly. She had come up to Buffy when they’d all been piling into their cars; an approach that was, for her, oddly subtle.  _ “I can’t do vengeance anymore. Well… I can, but I’d be exposing myself to human law enforcement, and they’re pesky and narrow-minded.”  _ Her gaze had firmed, decided. _ “But I still have contacts. Obviously I’m not privy to all of this, but I was in this game for enough years to have my suspicions…” _

Buffy had appreciated the offer insofar as she she welcomed the (odd) gesture of solidarity. She definitely didn’t want to break up the new, growing sympatico between herself and the ex-demon by acting all shocked or gruff or anything, so she had throttled down her first, instinctive reaction, which was to be all, ‘ugh, what are you even  _ saying _ , you nut?’ to shake her head slowly.  _ “I appreciate that, Anya, but it’s more complicated than you’re thinking, and I think we have it figured out. And it isn’t the kind of thing…” _ She’d struggled with it, aware that at the best of times, word-girl she was not, and to say this wrong would be possibly to condemn one of her best friends to some kind of low-key, under-the-table curse-age.  _ “I think sometimes people learn more from living with their mistakes and…”  _ What could she say to make Anya feel like there had been, would continue to be some sort of ongoing justice? That was, really, her gig as far as Buffy had been able to determine; justice via a payment of debt. _ “I dunno,”  _ she groped finally, _ “stewing in their guilt and stuff, than they do from being cursed. Does that make sense?” _

Anya looked dubious, like she was hearing an entirely new concept.  _ “I suppose, maybe. If they actually feel guilty. In my experience that’s fairly seldom. They have to recognize that they’ve even done something wrong, first.” _

_ “Tried,” _ Buffy had insisted grimly.  _ “Failed. Made a mistake, while… under the influence.” _

Anya had shaken her head insistently.  _ “That’s no excuse…” _

Buffy swung her head over to pin the girl with a faint glare.  _ “I could cut your head off right now for all the things you did while you had your demon,”  _ she pointed out bluntly. Anya appreciated frankness.  _ “I don’t, though, because you’re not doing ‘em now.” _

Anya had favored her with a cocked head and an curious look, as if they were having a simple ethical debate, and not one that might end in her being personally decapitated.  _ “Hm. Interesting point. I’ll consider it.”  _ And, with a small nod, she’d dropped back to go climb into the Citroen.

Buffy turned half-backward in the path to watch Xander and the ex-demon pace along behind them. Anya was eyeing Xander with a pensive expression, as if sizing him up on a new meter. Then, with a tiny shrug, she turned back to face forward, eyes flickering over Buffy’s face. “Well, sure. Disabling a few motorcycles. Doing vengeance on some misogynists. That’s just all in a day’s work. But this?”

Buffy smiled slightly, aware it was a predatory expression, and stalked under another streetlamp. The tepid light pooled briefly around her to limn the edges of the buff bricks, then faded, leaving the walkway in shadow. Beside her, Spike accordioned in against her shoulder to avoid bumping into a low bench, then spread out again, eyes darting around everywhere. He was a nervous wreck, though only she could really see it; see the tension floating around him like a living thing. 

His hands were so tight on the pommel of his borrowed sword that his knuckles were actually glowing in the dark, and the tails of his duster juddered around him like a poetry of anxiety. “Hey. We’re in this together. Side-by-side.” She tossed him a little of her edgy smile before returning to the casing of the silent campus, as-yet-untouched by violent, marauding depredations. A peaceful oasis, claimed by a lurking, unknown military force. /My college, with its own dark underbelly. Just like everything in Sunnydale./ “I've had it, you know? These guys are going down. All of ‘em. You can attack me. You can lurk around and screw up my town; that's fine. But  _ nobody _ messes with my boyfriend.”

Spike grinned into the night, briefly rerouted as she had hoped he would be. “Boyfriend, is it?”

“Ironically, yes, since once upon a time I was very ready to take  _ you _ down.”

“Same.” He tightened up again, eyes darting everywhere. “Or at least that was what I told everybody.” 

/That’s what you…/

Beside her, her vampire inhaled slowly and deeply of the cool night, as if taking in the free air while he still could in preparation for some long incarceration. “After watchin’ you in action, I’ve come to realize it’s probably safer to fight on your side, pet.”

Touched by the compliment, Buffy hid her blush beneath a smug smirk. “Damn straight.”

“…But they won’t hurt me, right? I’m considered human now. Totally human; I even have two middle names. They won’t know I was a demon, so they won’t try to capture me. No experiments or…”

“Just don’t talk about how you used to put boils on man-parts for fun, Sweetie, and you’re safe.”

A short silence rang through the night. “Is that what it’s all about? Or at least part of it? You want me to be safe?”

Another awkward-sounding pause. “Well, sure. As long as you’re human and, you know, embracing the humanity, then you’re not on Buffy’s radar. Every time you say something like, ‘I was good at my job, I celebrate my demon-y talents’, I worry that she might think you wanna just, you know, go back.” Xander’s voice tensed slightly. “I never want you to be part of  _ her _ job again.”

Buffy winced.

“Though, considering recent events, that’s maybe highly unlikely…”

/Okay, really, with the snark?/

“That’s sweet, Xander. I had no idea.”

Well, maybe those two were on the mend, or at least on the way to finding common ground again.

Smiling a little to herself, Buffy slipped her left hand into Spike’s right. He started a little, but then folded his fingers around hers; cool, dry, and reassuring in the night, and then swung his sword in a tight, controlled arc far off to her left in a kind of vaguely-unnerving metronome of deadly advertising. “We’re close, pet.”

God, he was tense. His anxiety telegraphed itself through his hand to her body, and Buffy felt her own muscles tightening up, prepping in some spots and going limber in all the right places preparatory to combat. Her fingers shifted automatically on the grip of her sword, and she nodded as she cased the walls of featureless night around them, seeking some sort of evidence. A door or a grate or something, a hidden wall, a manhole cover, even, considering how Spike had dug at the ground that one night during the whole will-be-done fiasco. “You recognize the area, or…”

“I can  _ feel _ it.”

She shot him a confused glance.

“Dunno how to explain it, luv. Just… Maybe it’s a predator thing? Been over this ground. Smells right, looks right, feels right.” His faraway expression sharpened, and the skin of his face tightened to something so fierce that his lips went all drawn. “Haven’t been hunted all that often, Buffy. Usually it’s the other way around, yeah? Not likely to forget the feeling, or any detail of it, escaping.”

Buffy’s emotions were in a roil. One part of her—probably the Slayer-y part—was torn between raging at the whole ‘predator’ descriptor, the reminder of what he was and how he had once used it, and a confused sympathy for how it might feel to be so trammeled and pursued. She had experienced that once or twice, would hate it too.

Two instinctive reactions, working at cross-purposes; they made her feel like she was flying apart at some very deep, primal level.

And then there was that part of Buffy who thought, who operated in a layer floating somewhere above the reflexive Slayer-ness; who dithered and feared and agonized. That part of her who knew Spike’s softer side, the part of her that recognized the humanness of him; that part of her wanted to comfort him for having to face all this again. It was all very with the conflict, and it made her kind of fly apart internally. “I believe you.” It was all she could manage, right about then. And in that moment, she was exceedingly aware of his hand in hers. /This is going to be hard. But I won’t trade it. And I won’t give it up./

She was all too aware, for the first time in hours, though, of her friends’ eyes—of Giles’ eyes—on them, felt her shoulders hunching a little under the weight of their judgmental regard. Bit her lip… and felt Spike squeeze her hand. “‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’ And sometimes that's alright, love, because sometimes things have to fall apart for new things to be built.”

/Okay, what?/

From somewhere in the darkness behind them, Giles’ voice floated up to meet them, sharp and surprised and filled with a new layer of uncomfortable surmise. “Yeats, is it?” 

Spike tensed just a hair, then did that thing Buffy recognized where he forcibly relaxed himself, as if he were throwing off someone’s curious gaze and drawing up some sort of invisible armor made of swagger and unconcern. “Oftimes when Byzantium falls in a great fire, new civilizations arise which are just as great.” 

A vast, roaring silence seemed to echo in the night between Spike and her Watcher, then, “That is a dreadful misapplication of the metaphor, you know.” A pause. “Or, do you?”

Nothing. Spike had his jaw practically wired shut, a muscle dancing in it like he had a tic going in there, and his eyes glittered as he faced front into the night. 

Buffy sighed heavily and, leaning forward, gave him a tug on his hand, brandished her sword, and plunged on into the waiting darkness. “Let’s get this over with before you have any more really bizarre, confusing conversations with Giles that only make sense to you.”

They went around a bend in the path, a little copse of trees on their right and a few others scattered to the left. They were going to run out of campus soon, out here on the edges by Phi Beta Phi and the other really out-there fraternities and sororities. Pretty soon they would be off in the hinterlands by the little arboretum run by those biology kids from the Keck Science Center, which effectively marked the northeast verge of…

Spike came to a sudden and complete stop as they rounded the bend. His hand twitched in hers, and his breathing kicked abruptly on; a harsh, gasping pant made loud in the near-silence of ceased footfalls and highlighted by the fact that he had not been breathing at all for the past minute or so. “Okay, what…”

He didn’t say anything. Just lifted his sword and pointed with it. There was a storm-drain ahead of them; one of the big culvert kind with the grate across the front. “It’s not how I got out. But… I think I remember being carried in there. Got out somewhere else nearby, but…” The sword trembled a little, dropped, and his voice shook, just a tiny bit around the edges. “Was tased or summat when they brought me in; half out of it. Remember the tunnel, though. Big enough to admit a whole bloody troop of the soldier-boys. Them liftin’ the grate an’ that.” He nodded once, a jerky motion. “Yeah. That’s it.”

He stilled, stopped breathing again. And he was hard as a rock against Buffy’s arm. 

Man, this was tough for him. He was freaking out. 

Buffy squeezed his hand once and released it to turn. “Alright you guys. This is our way in. You ready?”

Xander stepped forward. Glanced at Anya, who stood a little behind him and to one side, looking pale and uncertain. “Okay, Buff, here’s the thing. How do we know this isn’t a trap?”

Buffy blinked, thrown. “A trap? They don’t even know we’re coming.”

“Yeah? Says _ him.  _ But if what he says is true, they could be controlling him with that thing in his head, right? I mean,” and here Xander scoffed, sounding bitter. “How does he suddenly remember where to go? They could have some kind of… I dunno; homing thing in his chip-deal or whatever, and now maybe he’s leading us into an ambush! Or…”

“Think you’ve been readin’ too many comic books, Harris,” Spike grunted, still facing the dark opening with a grim note in his voice. 

Buffy knew that tone. He was psyching himself up to do something he really didn’t want to do, which made Xander’s accusation all the more painful. “Look, Xander; I know what you’re afraid of. I get it. But that’s really not what’s going on here. What’s happening is…”

“What? That he’s suddenly completely on our side?” That belligerent thing was starting to creep back into Xander’s tones. “That he totally did a one-eighty out of nowhere in the last three days,  _ why?”  _ A sneer worked its way up into his voice, making his inferences known, but he didn’t leave it that way. His bitterness seeped through, and he said it anyway. “Because it works the other way around when they’re already soulless?”

“Xander!” Willow exclaimed, sounding shocked at his angle of attack.

Xander rushed on without pause. “You expect us to  _ believe _ that, Buffy? Believe it’s not all just an act?” 

The ground was falling out from under her. She was drowning. She opened her mouth, struggling without any air in her lungs… but before she could rebut, Spike had cut his hand sideways through the air, a sharp slash of negation. “We don’t have the sodding time for this. Come if you’re gonna, Harris, or leave, but shut it and stop giving the Slayer grief because you’ve a problem with me. And keep a civil tongue in your head while you do it, or I’ll have your ears.”

She could breathe. She  _ could _ .

“Rather putting the cat among the pigeons, aren’t you Spike,” Giles put in, sounding both pained and almost a little amused. “And while I will rather agree that Xander is being exceedingly tactless, and that he should apologize to Buffy…”

“You want me to… Giles, you  _ know _ …”

“Do shut up, Xander. I will, however, say, Spike, that he has made an excellent point as to your abrupt change in tacks. It concerns me not a little that you’ve so suddenly become so very helpful, when not four days past you wouldn’t tell us more than that you were so unremittingly traumatized by the situation that you couldn’t remember a single thing about this place. And yet here you are now, leading us directly to the front door.”

Somehow, Buffy got her thoughts back together, her voice back in order. She was shaking all over, hid it by grounding her sword so that she could lean on it, cover the pommel with both hands. “Well, he’s not chained in a bathtub right now, is he?” she pointed out reasonably enough. “And he’s not being starved while we laugh about it and eat a full holiday meal in front of him, and taunt him because it’s fun to poke at the wild animal in captivity. So he’s a little more… what’s the word, Spike?”

“Disposed.” It came out flat and clipped.

“That’s it. Disposed to help us now.” God she felt tired. Just wrecked, by all this. /Why did I think it was over? Why was I so dumb?/ “Like he said the whole time.”

Giles sighed and rubbed between his eyes with the knuckle of one thumb. “How one manages a prisoner of war when one does not have the facilities…”

Buffy had very abruptly had enough. “Oh my God, Giles, be real. We weren’t acting like the good guys at all and you know it.” She swung on Xander, leveled him with a challenging glare. “And we don’t have time for this now. I’m with Spike. We can deal with that later, okay? We need to go, not stand around outside the entrance arguing. You said you’re always with me. You either put up or shut up on that, Xan; which is it?”

Xander glared, truculent and with sparks of anger in his eyes now. “That’s the big question, huh Buff? Because  _ you’re _ with Spike.  _ Spike; _ you know, evil undead killer? And we all know how well that worked out the last time…”

“Oh, bloody hell,” Spike groaned behind her.

“So I just don’t know if I can play along this time,” he wound up aggressively, “when I remember even if you don’t that that usually ends up with a lot of my friends dead.”

“All very valid concerns, Xander,” Giles broke in, “and ones that should be addressed later. I for one am much more interested, however, in the one you made about the possibility of the chip being made into a sort of behavioral handle…”

“I mean, that’s possible,” Willow broke in, “and I’m not the biggest fan of the whole ‘Buffy dates another vampire’ scenario myself, but to be fair…”

“Okay, just stop. All of you. Look.” Buffy stepped away from Spike to face her friends, wondering distantly why she had to do this now, at the threshold of battle, instead of in some staging area somewhere where it would be so much more appropriate. Why she had to do it at all, dammit, when it was her love life. /But  _ fine _ . You wanna go there? I’ll go there./ “You wanna know why he’s helping us now? My  _ mom _ taught me something, Xan, Giles. If you treat Spike nicely, you get nice Spike. If you treat Spike lovingly, you get loving Spike. I taught me the rest, which is if you treat Spike badly, you get bad Spike. Now, I dunno about you, but I’d rather have nice Spike than bad Spike, and I’ve definitely found that I like loving Spike, so I’m picking options one and two…”

“This is all very entertaining,” Anya broke in, sounding like she should have brought popcorn.

“Loving… Oh my God, I was hoping I was wrong. Buffy, didn’t you learn anything from…”

“And,” she interrupted, “_I’m_ the Slayer here, Xander; not you, not Giles, not Willow.” Felt Spike’s words from the motel toll powerfully through her. “_I_ am. That means what I say about vampires goes in this town, because _I am the Slayer._ And what I say is that we’ve all treated Spike badly, even after he came to us for help… and gave him no room to be anything but bad Spike. But when he was here with Mom, he was nothing but a sweet gentleman, even when he was totally unsupervised…”

“That’s all very well,” Giles began, floundering. 

Xander made a sour face. “Yeah, he was probably angling to eat her.”

Spike growled pointedly.

Buffy met them both with a flat stare. “Since when would a vamp need to sweet-talk a woman like my mom first before eating her, Xander?”

“Or… or, I dunno, get information out of her about you, or…”

Spike scoffed, an expression with which Buffy agreed wholeheartedly. “About the state of our cocoa-and-marshmallows?” she demanded snarkily.

“What?”

“Xander, Spike gives what he gets. I suggest if you wanna get along with him, you start giving nice.”

Willow broke in again, sounding thoughtful. “You know, I have to admit, I’m not the hugest fan in general, what with the drunken kidnapping and the broken bottle thing and the ‘came to the dorm to nibble on me’ thing… but every time I was even a tiny bit nice to him, Spike totally cracked and stopped being evil-vamp-guy and started going all smooshy on me…”

“Oi!”

“…And spilling his guts about what was bothering him instead. He, like, shared his insecurities, even cried a little.”

“Listen, you. That was between you and me, you little minx!”

Willow frowned a little, as if working through a complicated puzzle in her head, and totally ignored Spike to continue. “Though, granted that might’ve been the booze talking, and I was still scared to death, and that night in the dorm he might still have bitten me if it weren’t for the chip…”

“Wouldn’t have drained you, maybe, Red, for what it’s worth,” Spike put in with a faint flicker of a smile. “Or at least, wouldn’t’ve wanted to, for all I was starving. You’re too sweet a piece. I’m that fond of you, actually.”

Wil blushed a little and tried a shrug when she finally met Spike’s eyes. “All I’m saying is, maybe Buffy’s right about you, that there’s more to you than just your… vamp-ness. Maybe you’re a little more complicated than ‘undead killer guy’, and if we can tap into that…”

The slow smile spread across Spike’s features; the one Buffy loved, the boyish one. “Cheers, Red.” Reaching into his inside breast pocket, he tugged out a cigarette, slipped it into his lips, found the Zippo. It gleamed in the faint hints of lamplight from around the bend as he bent over his cupped hands to light up. “Always knew I liked you.”

“See?” Buffy patted his arm. “Spike gives what he gets. Give nice, get nice.”

Spike mumbled something around his cigarette that included the words ‘sodding lapdog’. 

Xander broke in again, sounding incredulous. “You’re actually saying you want me to be  _ nice _ to Captain Peroxide?”

Buffy sighed and turned back to Xander. “You get what you give,” she repeated. “Keep being an asshole, you’ll get asshole-Spike.”

Spike grinned around his cigarette. “No complaints from me on that count.”

Xander stared at Buffy, clearly at a loss. Then his eyes narrowed to something deadly. “And what are  _ you _ getting from him?” he demanded sharply. “Aside from all this… cooperation.”

Buffy gaped at her friend… then shivered at the dangerous quality of the low growl emanating from her vampire. That was a threat, emitted at an almost subsonic level. /Not helping, Spike./ Not that she blamed him. She really didn’t have time for this bullshit. “Right now? Friendship. Mutual protection. Partnership. Some really great kisses, I’m not gonna lie.” /And yes, there’s gonna be more, and that’s none of your damn business, Xander!/ 

Xander actually sneered. “Is that gonna be your MO with every vampire from now on, Buff? Get what you give?”

“Xander!” Willow sounded stunned.

To Buffy’s surprise Giles spoke up next, while she was still staring in shock. “Xander, you’re out of line!” 

Having her Watcher defend her, despite everything that had happened with Angelus, gave her the strength to turn to Xander and fight back. “Look, if you’re gonna be a pig, just go. Just leave. I’m done with you being overly obsessed with who I sleep with, and being a jerk about it because you have an issue with vampires, and me and vampires. This is  _ my _ life, not yours. And I told you that you don’t have a say in who I…”

“Yeah, okay. Maybe I don’t get to tell you who to love or trust, but I do get to tell you who to sleep with if it affects  _ me _ . And it  _ does!  _ It  _ affects _ me! It affects  _ us _ , don’t you  _ see _ that? It affects my health and safety, and Wil’s, and Giles’, and Anya’s, because the last time you got too close to a vampire we all almost died! Jenny Calendar  _ did _ die! I…”

In spite of herself, Buffy flinched, quailed. And found herself up against the bulwark of Spike’s body. He caught her arm, frowning; holding her up while the roaring in her head became so loud that the world whirled. “You’re talkin’ about that business with Angelus, I’m assumin’, Harris.”

“Of  _ course _ I am, you undead twat, and mind your own business till someone talks to you!” 

Spike dropped his cigarette, ground it beneath his boot with slow, exquisite care. The movements seemed extra slow right now, outside the haze of Buffy’s non-thoughts, and she found herself focusing on the brightness of the tiny orange ember, the way it vanished beneath his dark treads, was extinguished. Once it was gone she couldn’t tear her eyes from the spot where the butt lay, pale and crumpled flat on the grass; not really seeing it. Not really registering anything. She was far away from the world, hovering somewhere while Spike rebutted; behind her but beyond, somehow. “Well, since you’re talking  _ about _ me, figure I’m entitled to speak up. One, the Slayer’s not fucking me, so that’s not at issue here, though if she ever decided to, I’d be one lucky bastard, yeah, and not likely to throw it over by hurting her mates, however ungrateful they might be. Two, got no soul to lose, so there’s that. Startin’ at ground zero. And since I’ve vowed not to hurt you now—though I’m kinda regrettin’ it at mo’ the way you’re hurtin’ our girl—you’re pretty bloody safe unless Buffy tells me you’ve insulted her one too many times.”

All so far away.

“Oh, as if a soulless demon’s promise means jack shit…”

“His word is good,” Buffy broke in, able to breathe again. The haze in her brain was clearing, and it was time they  _ all _ knew. She lifted her eyes from the cigarette butt with a great wrench and a feeling of vast effort, of regret at the loss of the simplicity of it all. “It was good when we fought Angelus together, and it’s good now.”

_ “What?”  _

She opened her mouth, though the summoning of verbiage was like lifting weights in her brain, but Giles stepped smoothly in before she had to. “Buffy’s right. Spike fought at her side against Angelus, kept Drusilla from me so that I could be freed. He did his part in that battle, honored his word; with the Slayer, no less, his sworn enemy.” The careworn eyes narrowed on Spike, and an ironic twist touched her Watcher’s lips. “Made a truce to keep the world in place and honored it, didn’t you.”

”Hot tea and Manchester bloody United, Watcher. Think I wanted to see my git of a grandsire send the whole soddin’ thing down the sump because he felt soiled by love?” A faint flicker of a smile on his mobile mouth that Buffy knew was for her ‘accomplishment’. “Besides... wanted to see what the Slayer would become, given time free of the tosser, so I could fight her again.” A little grin. Just the right combination of believable swagger and not too much violence to put their backs up.

Giles took this in without a blink, though his lips remained pursed. “He kept his word, either way. As such, I agreed to let him out of the tub at my flat; in the knowledge that he had honored his word with the Slayer in the past, and saved my life by it.”

A short silence, then a little loosening in the taut body behind Buffy’s. “Ta, Watcher.”

“Don’t get a big head about it. It doesn’t mean I’m on your side in this business. Just stating a fact.” Giles turned back to Xander and removed his glasses to dangle them from one fist while he rubbed between his eyes some more. “Look. If Spike says he’s helping Buffy and that he’s not under any sort of… conditioning…”

“Not ruddy likely.”

“…Then we must take him at his word until he proves otherwise. Buffy trusts him, and she’s earned that trust from us. In any case, we’ve no other solid plan, and know of no other way into the home base of these soldier types, so we might as well see about this entrance here. Perhaps Willow can conjure a bit of light for us, if she focuses very intently, since I don’t think any of us have such a thing as a torch…”

“A wh…”

“Flashlight,” Spike translated shortly. “Speak American, or the kiddies’ll be off breaking branches off the sodding trees and settin’ ‘em alight.”

Giles snorted dryly. “Right.”

“Well, I didn’t bring a flashlight,” Buffy murmured. “Did any of you?”

Anya rolled her eyes. “I don’t even have the right kind of shoes. And do you all fight so much about vampires? Because it’s really quite fascinating, considering your kinship.”

“Kinship?” Xander made a sour face. “Just because they used to be human doesn’t make us related. And no one told me I was going into a stupid sewer thingy, so no, I don’t have a flashlight.”

“Oh, comin’ along still, are you, Harris?”

“I wasn’t talking about the kinship between humans and vampires, though of course the fact that vampires breed with humans is a fascinating sidebar in demon reproductive biology…”

“Ahn, please don’t talk about vampire breeding right now, okay? I’ve so had my fill of gross.”

Buffy made a mental note to talk a  _ lot _ with Anya, very soon, about a lot of subjects. “Wil, can you do the thing with the light?”

Willow sounded kind of overwhelmed at the thought of holding a spell that long. “Um, I guess I could, uh, try to conjure… Um. Yeah. I’ll see what I can do.”

“If not, Spike’ll have to take point. He’s got the best night-vision of all of us.” Turning to him, Buffy laid a hand on his arm. “You okay with this?”

He nodded, vibrating with tension but containing it well enough. “Rather head into the bleedin’ lion’s den then sit around dealing with all this palaver.”

“Wow, that bad, huh?” It was a lame joke, but to be fair, a few minutes ago he would rather have been anywhere else than heading into that hole. It seemed if nothing else, facing Xander’s vituperation had helped decide Spike. He was going to prove himself to the Scoobies tonight if it killed him; not necessarily because he cared what they thought of his motivations, per se… but because it affected how they thought of  _ her _ .

Not one of them would ever truly understand how much sacrifice was involved in his volunteering to guide them, heading back into that place. But Buffy did, and she honored it. “Thank you,” she whispered to him as they headed toward the yawning black mouth of the tunnel. “You know you don’t have to do this, right?”

He shot her a quick, intense glance under unbleached brows, then resolutely faced the grate and nodded. Reached out with his free hand, gripped the bars and gave her a nod. “Give us a hand, Slayer?”

/I love you./ “Okay,” she answered aloud, and shifted to put her free hand to the bars next to him. “One, two… three!”

With a low shriek that made her wince, the grate shifted open, swinging reluctantly upward to reveal a low, wide aperture. “Right, then,” Spike breathed, and gave a nod. “Off we go. ‘Once more unto the breach’, and all that rot.”

Behind them, Giles made a small, startled sound of recognition, and what was  _ with _ them tonight? 

Ignoring the strange interplay between her Watcher and her vampire boyfriend—it was probably (maybe?) some weird British thing, anyway—Buffy ducked into the vast cement culvert. And headed into inky darkness.

***

The first evidence that they were on the right track was when the tunnel branched off from the sewer system at a weird dead-end, and turned into a tunnel seemingly hollowed out of solid rock. The second was when they were assaulted by what appeared to be automatic motion lights; a shocking development in the pitch black of the rocky passage since Willow’s attempt at conjuring and maintaining a light on the fly had sputtered and failed after about four minutes. Faced with the unexpected blaze Spike had recoiled and spat a few choice expletives, muttering about ‘bloody bastards’ and ‘sodding soldier prats’ and that kind of thing while reeling against the sudden shock of glare against his oversensitive vamp eyeballs. Then, before any of them could even react, “Cameras, love.”

“Oh. Damn. Right.” /People’s exhibit number three./ Buffy hadn’t heard the miniscule whirring of gimbals or whatever that meant surveillance devices had been triggered by their presence, but if they didn’t want these jerks to know they were coming, they’d better do something about it. She followed Spike’s pointing finger, swung her sword hard, and whacked the lens off the end of the camera slowly swinging around to focus on them. 

The pinging of broken glass on rough stone seemed overloud in the abrupt silence. Buffy shrugged the new tension out of her shoulders and glanced around her in the blaring light. “Well, they’re gonna know someone’s here I guess.”

Spike grunted and pressed on without comment, sword held at attention in his fist and ready for anything. Every line in his body broadcast a ‘they’re not gonna take me alive again’ kind of attitude.

The rest of their crew exchanged glances and followed hesitantly, stumbling a little over the bright relief of the rough floor—they seemed to be in some kind of cave system by now—everyone warier than they had been moments before.

The first real barrier came in the form of a door with an electronic lock; the kind with high-tech access stuff happening. Handprints or voice access or codes or some crap, who knew. Spike poked the keypad deal for a second, then shrugged. “‘Star Wars’ moment, pet. Either we break the bloody thing and it locks us out forever, or it opens. Want to flip a coin?”

Before Buffy could answer, Xander broke in, sounding incredulous. “You’ve seen ‘Star Wars’?”

Spike spared him a withering glance. “Opening bloody night, wasn’t it? New York City, 1977. Still got my ticket stub. Worth a sodding fortune, that.”

Incredulous gave way to deeply impressed. “Wow. That’s so awesome. Did you know you were gonna see something that was a part of history, or did you just think, ‘What the heck; might as well go see a space movie’?”

Spike eyed Buffy’s excited compatriot with a slightly less jaundiced air than usual. “No one knows till after how that sort of thing’s gonna shake out, innit? Just went. Dru didn’t wanna go, so I went by myself. Saw the thing with a load of other punks, had a grand old time. Loved it, went home. End of. Then the whole bloody thing blew up after, and I got to say I was there.”

“Wow.” Xander actually sounded kind of orgasmic. 

Buffy shook her head in disbelief. “Okay, now that we’ve established that you’re a closet nerd, Spike, can we move on to the whole door thing? Why would breaking the box deal break the door?”

Xander fielded that one. “First rule of the Empire. Kill the door controls, and the door locks up hard. There might even be a failsafe blast door…”

“Xander, for God’s sake, this is real life, not a film.” Giles sounded strained.

“Oh jeez,” Buffy muttered, and strode forward to swing her sword down hard in the exact same manner as she had dealt with the stupid camera. Bye-bye door-control-thinger. 

The box on the wall was shorn away as if it were made of tinfoil. Sparks flew from the torn wires, to the accompaniment of a strange, dwindling buzzing noise. And then the door slid open with a low  _ shoop _ .

“Well then. That’s handy… bloody hell.” Ducking, Spike came up smoothly with his katana to block a rifle barrel coming down toward his head, then rolled away to make room for Buffy, who could actually do something about the two soldiers who were currently leveling guns at them. 

/Shit, shit, shit./ Instinct screamed at Buffy that she could not kill humans. Everything else in her screamed that there were machine guns pointed at her and her friends and if she didn’t do something they were all going to die. So, she did the next best thing, on autopilot. She swung upward, knocking the gun barrels away from their current trajectories before they could fire, then continued her arc with a smooth roundhouse kick. One head, the guy on the right; connecting smoothly with his temple. Lights out. Then, snap back with her heel to the one on the left. Same.

They were both down before either had the chance to pull the trigger. 

Spike straightened from his tuck-and-roll, eyes glowing. “Christ, that was gorgeous, pet.”

She managed a little shrug, breathing a lot harder than the exercise warranted. It actually almost physically hurt her as well, to attack humans. Like, yeah, she’d stopped a few bullies in her day, but this was different. This was real combat, not grabbing some jerk’s wrist before he could swing at a defenseless geek. “You know. All in a day’s work.” /Hopefully I didn’t kick too hard and give them brain damage or something…/

“They’ll be fine, love,” Spike told her quietly, as if he could read her mind. Probably he could, or close to it, what with her supposed glass face, and the whole smelling her pheromones and fear indicators, and hearing her probably speedy heartbeat and crap like that. “Their pulses are normal. They’re just down for the count.”

Buffy straightened slowly, nodding. “Okay,” she breathed, taking it for fact, then more decisively, “Okay. Let’s go before more come.”

“Right.” Stepping forward, he peered around the edge of the door, then glanced back toward the rest of the group. “Think we’re on the same level as the cages.”

“The…” Buffy was a little taken aback at that. “How… many demons are they holding down here?”

Spike’s mouth twisted grimly as he stepped over the threshold and its complement of unconscious guards. “Didn’t exactly stop to make careful count, pet. A fair number, though. I’d hazard upwards of twenty.”

“Jeez…” Buffy turned back to Willow. “Alright, we’re in. You ready, Wil?”

Willow pulled in a deep breath and settled herself visibly. “Everybody hold hands. Don’t be shy.”

They all did so, Buffy sheathing her sword to take the lead, Spike folloewing suit to catch up her left hand in his right and following with Giles grabbing his left with a sour expression. Xander tucked his mace in his belt to grab Giles’ left hand, and so forth down to Willow, who used her free hand to scatter a handful of herbs and mutter her ‘nobody look, we’re not here’ spell. 

A short silence. Xander shuffled his feet a little. Giles cleared his throat. 

“Did it work?” Buffy asked.

Wil shrugged and tucked her little baggie of whatever herbal thing back into her satchel. “I guess we’ll see. You know, whenever we run into the next patrol or whatever.”

“This is so nervous-making,” Xander muttered.

There was nothing else to do, really, but continue down the long, rough-hewn corridor. They passed a number of structural deals made of red metal, probably built into the wall to support the excavation, and then the tunnel turned a corner… and they almost walked smack-dab into a troop of three guys in olive-drab sweaters and cargo pants, carrying machine guns and looking very hard-faced and lethal. 

Spike froze and turned into an unbreathing vampire-waxwork; abruptly enough that Giles actually collided with his back. Buffy squeezed his hand reassuringly while they all shifted as silently as possible to one side to let the commando guys pass by. Which they did, without any sign that they saw the invading Scooby force in the slightest. 

/Jeez, that’s super unnerving!/ But it worked. After the little squad disappeared around the bend and the echoes of their footsteps had vanished, Buffy let out a breath. “Good job, Wil!” she whispered. 

Wil made a sound kind of like, ‘eek’. 

“Figure we’ve got five minutes at most before they come tear-assin’ back, ready for war,” Spike pointed out tensely. At Buffy’s worried look he tilted his head back in the direction from which they had come. “Once they find their boys ‘ve been taken out, yeah? No doubt that’s what they’re goin’ to investigate; the radio-silence.”

“Captain Peroxide’s got a point,” Xander chipped in reluctantly. 

“Well, I guess we better get a move on, then,” Buffy whispered back, and gave the line a tug. 

One more bend of corridor, though, found her stopping stock-still in shock. 

_ “Skracken av det,”* _ Anya whispered. Her meaning was clear in her tone.

Buffy was right there with the ex-demon. She was faced with a series of sterile, white cubicles—she couldn’t even call them cells—plexiglass-fronted, utterly featureless, each graced with some sort of demon; some of them not even remotely dangerous. Like, yeah; granted, some of them were pretty bad, but some of these… Like that, over there? That was a Torflinn. A  _ Torflinn! _ It had  _ flippers! _ It couldn’t hurt anyone if it  _ tried!  _ Like, god, were there any Loose-Skinned demons in here, like poor Clem?

Some of the captives raged against the walls, the plexiglass, but most sat, dejected, on the floors. This was partially because there was no furniture; not even a chair, much less a bed or a shelf or anything. And worse than that… there were no facilities in any of them for the species that… needed that kind of thing. Just a drain in the middle of the tile. The floors had… well, filth on them, since there was nowhere for the demons to relieve themselves but down the drains, and definitely no privacy for such an act. And everything was lit with huge, bright strobe lights; the kind that would blind these mostly-nocturnal creatures and made it clear that they were under the microscope, on display. It was horrifying, disgusting…

Inhumane.

“Wow, they’ve been busy,” Xander muttered, blinking around them.

Buffy just shook her head. “This is worse than the dog pound.”

“What?”

Willow was staring too, looking a little sick. “Th… That one over there is a werewolf, Buffy.”

Buffy swiveled her head to get a glimpse, and saw a figure partially wolfed out, which was... “How does that…

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Willow whispered. “It’s not a full moon. Not for a few more…”

“Pain,” Spike murmured. “You can bring the wolf out if the moon’s close enough and you induce enough pain.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the werewolf’s… enclosure. “Sonics, for that one. Can hear it from here. If it’s bad for me out here I can’t even imagine it in there.”

“Oh Goddess…” Willow sounded like she was going to throw up. “Can’t we get her out?”

It really pained Buffy to say no, to leave the poor werewolf there being tortured, but… “Not without blowing our cover, Wil.”

“Let’s just get on.” Spike’s voice was tight.

Buffy turned to catch a glimpse of his profile. “Is this where you…”

His face closed up. “Yeah.” 

/Oh God, oh God, oh God… No wonder was ready to dust to get out of here. No wonder he was ready to come to  _ us _ , even, to stay away./ 

/And here I am, bringing him back./

Her hand tightened on his. /I won’t let them take you. I promise./ He had come back down here for her. God, that was…

“Buffy, promise me you’ll stake me first, if it looks like they’re gonna get us, yeah?” His voice was quiet, steady, and very, very bleak. 

Buffy bit her lip, hard. The idea of staking Spike,  _ her _ Spike, was the most incredibly painful thing she could imagine. Even more painful in its own way than when she had had to kill Angel; probably partly  _ because  _ she had had to kill Angel. Like a bad echo, a ‘why do my choices always end in me having to kill the men I love’ kind of echo. Also probably because it wouldn’t be because he had done anything to deserve it or to stop the world from ending or anything that dire. It would be by his request; a mercy killing, and to do such a thing when there was any other chance…

But she had asked him to make this sacrifice. She could do no less than promise him this in return. “I will never let them put you back in here. If it comes down that…” Something coalesced in her head. “It was always gonna be you and me anyway, right? You’re mine, either way. So yeah. No one gets me but you, and no one gets you but me.” 

He let out a little breath, nodded. And to her surprise, a tiny smile touched his lips; one that lit his eyes, briefly chased away the haunted look. “Yeah. That’s a deal, Slayer.”

/Alright./

They passed a few other corridors, all of them filled with those godawful cells, and at least three quarters of the cells containing a demoralized or furious demon. Buffy was starting to wonder if maybe it might not be a good distraction to open the things up, except there was no real way that she could think of to open only certain ones, and she wasn’t feeling the whole ‘fight for your life against multiple foes’ scenario. A lot of those demons in there had no love for the Slayer, either, and one enemy at a time was just better odds, thank you very much. /I’ll keep it on the back-burner, though, in case sneaking is no longer an option./ 

They made another turn in this rabbit-warren of a place, and all of a sudden the endless, over-bright prison corridor opened up into a slightly more dim, much more cavernous area. Buffy had an overall impression of what would have happened if someone had hired an interior decorator and told them, ‘So, what I want is a fire-hydrants-and-aluminum-foil motif; can we do that?’ Everything either looked like red-painted metal or like someone had wrapped it in tinfoil; like some cheap scifi movie set, or something from an old James Bond flick. /Paging Dr. No. He wants his volcano back./ 

Mom would love this. She was way into Sean Connery, had made Buffy watch like every original Bond movie ever with her.

There was a roaring coming from somewhere, she noted vaguely, over the top of tinkering noises and a lot of low voices mumbling things to each other and the distant sounds of marching feet. And then Spike squeezed her hand. “Look down in the pit, love,” he murmured.

/Pit?/ Buffy turned her head in the direction indicated by his chin-point… and saw a horror.

A bunch of lab-coated guys were bent over a couple of steel gurneys in some deep, concrete gulch over there, beyond the edge of the platform past their exit. Between each group, on the gurneys, two of the captive Hellions were strapped down at necks, wrists, ankles, thighs, hips. Still, they were doing their level best to arch off the gurneys, to scream. Which was understandable  _ since they were being eviscerated while they were alive. _

Buffy had seen some awful things in her life. She had  _ done _ some awful things in her life. She had gutted her fair share of demons, for sure, but that was in the service of killing them as quickly as possible, not to… see what was inside and how it ticked. And heck yes, these Hellions had done some awful things too, and no doubt they deserved to pay for their crimes, but… Just…

“It’s like… frogs in science class…” Xander whispered, and even he sounded a little sick, now.

“Bloody hell…” Giles joined in.

“This is wrong, Buffy,” Willow broke in. “I know what they did was awful. I get it. I really, really get it. Spike, I get it. I swear, I do. But this is  _ wrong _ .”

Spike’s voice was tight when he answered. “I woke up when they were workin’ on me. They didn’t care. Passed out again, from the pain. Didn’t know what the bloody hell they were doin’ till after, but… Still have nightmares about it sometimes; feelin’ someone cuttin’ into my skull…”

“Oh  _ man _ ,” Xander whispered, as if he were imagining it.

Buffy didn’t  _ want _ to imagine it. But she knew what it was like to see Spike cope with nightmares. She would be there for that one, too. 

“They call us animals,” he went on with soft fervor. “But even animals have feelings, yeah?”

/Oh, hell no./ These people were going  _ down _ . “Okay, you guys,” Buffy informed her team tensely. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. “We’re gonna find a strategic place to get situated, and then…”

And then a roar went up, and the sounds of shouting began to echo from the far side of the open space. The screams were swiftly followed by the harsh barking of gunfire.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
The Yoruba (via Giles, via Google) was translated for us (thanks Giles).   
Anya's little oath, is, if Google is correct, meant to mean something along the lines of "the horror of it!"  
  
Tune in next week to see how our kids get out of this one! Unless you want to guess, because that's always fun.


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... I had to basically completely rewrite this chapter after I rewatched the episode and found out my memory of the layout of the Initiative was incredibly poor, lol.
> 
> Luckily for all of you, wolf_shadoe (my amazingwonderful person of a beta) is bomb and volunteered to go back over the whole thing, after having beta'd a wildly inaccurate original draft; right down at the wire here about two seconds before posting time, because she's rad like that. Otherwise Maloker himself only knows what kind of evil might have abounded in this thing.
> 
> Oh. Speaking of evil abounding... Fair warning; these two simply could not be kept under wraps anymore. I'm just saying. Some people's part-demon hybrids are just way too antsy to put up with being whacked with newspapers and hosed off for an entire 24 chapters. I lost the choke-chains on them, briefly, along about the end of this one, and had to drag them back to their respective corners to behave before they really got out of hand and screwed up the entire damned story. Spike was all, "What? I already said the thing to the Boy, and it was true when I said it; what the hell more do you want from us?"
> 
> They're absolutely impossible.   
IMPOSSIBLE.

The Scoobies huddled under the big metal stairway and watched while an injured Razor and his five remaining Hellions were decimated by the soldiers in their rescue attempt. That was all fine and dandy, and honestly it seemed like maybe they should all just leave these guys to it; mission accomplished, right? Except, now Buffy was more worried about what these creepy commandos were up to than she was about the last remaining demon bikers. 

Which was why when Razor and his final remaining lieutenant got the whole room’s attention by grabbing up someone in a lab coat as hostage, Buffy made what she figured was the best possible executive decision under the circumstances. After all, if these idiots were going to so nicely make with the distractions, maybe it was time to treat it as a nice gift from on high. Not that she was used to getting a lot of breaks from upstairs; but either way, why waste the ones you got, right? /Time to screw up these nimrods' plans. Maybe even get out of here before they realize we even paid a visit./ 

Maybe they could manage to free some of the less offensive demons from those cells while they were at it, while everyone was still busy dealing with this dumbass, doomed little Hellion invasion. Kill two birds. Because no way she was leaving that Loose-Skinned one and that poor, tortured werewolf in here if she could help it. And the Torflinn! Like, what even were they gonna  _ do _ with something that spent all its time flippering around in Logan Swamp eating dead stuff?

She was just about to hiss the new plan at the rest of their little mostly-human chain... when said strategy was completely derailed with a shock so powerful that it felt like a slap across the face.

She  _ recognized _ Razor’s captive. /No  _ way _ ./ "Willow,” she whispered,  _ “look.”  _ Her stomach was going to fall into her shoes. She felt cold all over. /I _ have  _ to be seeing things, right? First Riley, and now…/

Wil leaned around the rest of their hand-clasped line to look. “Is that Professor  _ Walsh?” _

Buffy closed her eyes for a moment, let the world spin around her. 

“Buffy, what is it, pet?”

She shook her head, uncertain if anything was real anymore. “The woman the Hellions have over there? Is our Psych professor.”

A moment of silence from her vampire, then, “You do a unit yet on Pavlov?”

Buffy’s eyes popped open, because, huh? “Yeah, why?”

“What about BF Skinner?”

“Who?”

Spike’s voice turned bitter. “Interesting that she’d touch on the one and not the other.” 

“We haven’t got there yet,” Willow whispered along the line. “Why?”

Spike looked oddly certain of something all of a sudden. “That one runs the lot as put this thing in my skull. Makes me wonder a bit now, if she’s a psychology professor as well, what her game is with it. Whether it’s all a great Skinner’s Box. The torture, the starvation, the electrical zaps in m’head an’ the like.” His mouth tightened to a thin line. “Whether I’m bein’ trained.” His eyes flickered reluctantly along their unlikely daisy-chain to touch briefly on Xander. “Maybe Harris is right, yeah?”

Xander frowned back in confusion. “Right about what?”

Spike jerked his head once, as if shaking something off. “Question is, what for? I never thought it was about anything but starvin’ me. Turn the pest toothless; but then why not just dust me, innit? And it might explain why they were so hot to keep me, study me in here like it’s some great bloody maze.” His voice went grim. “Makes one wonder what else might it be about, in the long run.”

Giles made a startled noise beside him. If possible, Spike’s tones turned even more bleak. “Never much thought past the moment, yet; survivin’… but if there’s more to it, then that’s a helluva question. An’ that bein’ the case, if it’s used on another, like, say, a Gavokh…”

Buffy frowned pensively. “A Gavokh doesn’t kill because it needs to eat.”

Spike shook his head. “No, but then neither did I half the time. You and I both know I can feed without killing…”

“You  _ can?” _ Xander demanded, shocked.

That one earned her friend a glare reserved for ‘nits’. “The killing was partly just to satisfy the need for mayhem. I can get that now fightin’ whatever of my own kind comes knockin’, lookin’ for a brawl. Doesn’t hardly matter, yeah, long as I get to throw punches with someone. Same with a soddin’ Gavohk. An’ if you can teach it to fight  _ for _ you…”

Giles inhaled sharply. “You’re insane, Spike. No way would any military attempt to harness dangerous… Harness  _ demons _ , for… For that sort of…”

“Tried to teach dolphins to carry bloody torpedoes up, didn’t they? The unspent ones? Clean up the soddin’ ocean floor an’ that, as if they had a right to do it to beasts cleverer even, maybe, than you lot. Blew up how many of the poor buggers before they gave it up as a bad job; and that not till the animal rights activists got wind of it…”

“They  _ what?” _ Willow demanded, horrified.

“Saw it with the Nazis as well.” Spike’s voice was steeped in what Buffy had come to recognize as his ‘painful memory’ tone. “These bastards’ll do anything they think gives ‘em an advantage against some ruddy warlord,” he finished grimly. “They don’t half care who they kill to do it, and we all know it. King and country’s all that matters to ‘em.”

Buffy was starting to experience some serious nausea. “Wil, when we get out of here, show me the chapter on this Skinner guy.”

“Oh, you know I’m looking it up again first thing. This is so with the ew.”

“Wait, shh…” The Hellions were backing up slowly with their hostage… to right opposite of the Scooby position. In seconds, Buffy and Co. were cut off. Maggie Walsh and her two demon captors were standing near the bottom of the stairs, like they were hoping to escape that way with her in tow. 

Predictably, a whole troop of soldiers approached in their wake, guns at the ready and looking wary and freaked at the thought of losing their head scientist chick. 

One of them, by the way, was Riley Finn.

“You know, none of that lot’s entirely human, pet,” Spike informed Buffy all casually. 

_ “Excuse _ me?”

He nodded at the approaching troop of commandos. “‘Member how I said bein’ on a hellmouth gets everyone juiced up? Well, that lot for sure is; or at any rate, they smell as if they’ve been given a bit of a demon cocktail.”

“What, like…” Buffy felt a rising tide of horror, thinking of Riley Finn, corn-fed Iowa boy who had wanted to teach her to drive, being somehow not just some clandestine soldier-guy and part of a creepy demon-torturing project, but also somehow weirdly part-demon as well. “Like they use the demons here to…”

“Dunno what they’re doing, Slayer, but the whole lot of them smell a bit off, yeah?”

And the hits just kept on coming. “I think we need to get out of here. And then we need to find a way to get these jerks out of Sunnydale.”

Unfortunately, her whisper must have carried. Razor’s head jerked up. His tiny, pig-like eyes swiveled in the Scoobies’ direction, huge ears twitching. Then he sniffed, long and deep, and growled; a low, guttural sound filled with menace.  _ “Slayer.” _

“Well, shit,” Xander summed up quietly. 

“I’m thinking time to bail,” Wil put in, and started tugging their train to its feet, caboose-first.

They all struggled to rise smoothly without losing a grip on one-another’s hands. They even managed to stay invisible long enough to circle around the tete a tete going on there at the foot of the steps which had sheltered them. But as luck might have it, things went wrong not when expected, when maneuvers were at their most difficult, but simply because there happened to be difficulty coordinating the speed of the train. 

Buffy and Spike, in the lead, stepped over a body. They did so with the agility born of practice. Giles, following them, managed it with a certain spryness belying his supposed bookworm status. Xander, though, tripped a little, bumping into Anya, who bumped into Willow. 

The whole system fell apart.

There was no way to know who let go of whom first, but the summation was that very shortly the only remaining invisible person in their troop was their witch. Just as swiftly, every nearby eye was on the group of random teens-with-vampire-and-middle-aged-librarian who had suddenly appeared in their midst. “Oh, crap,” Anya whispered.

Spike didn’t waste a single second. He dove for the nearest door, some incredibly solid-looking thing with the numbers ‘314’ painted on it. Of course, the stupid thing didn’t budge, even with his and Buffy’s combined strength wrenching at it. 

It had one of those card-reader deals next to it. Buffy tried to shear it off just as she had done to the one back by the tunnels, but she couldn’t cut it this time. It was super-reinforced; deeply recessed into the wall without any exposure between setting and the wire-tubing stuff, and had a crazy-hard metal casing. Also, her sword was seriously dull by now. Then Spike gave it a shot too, because why not. Katana or no, his sword bent a little on the damn thing. /Shit, shit, shit./

Backs against the door, they swiveled around to face the bank of guns suddenly leveled at their torsos. To one side, Razor was grinning and yanking Professor Walsh toward the first step of the staircase with his buddy in tow, clearly prepared to use the distraction of their presence to make good his escape. 

Oh, how the tables had turned.

_ “Buffy?” _

/Well, what do you know, it’s Riley Finn again./ He even seemed to be in charge in some way. He was standing at the center of the main group of soldiers, his gun held a little lower than the rest. He was currently staring at Buffy as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Which was really kind of funny, since... shouldn't he have recognized her as the girl who'd been out on Fairhaven whacking heads off of demons a little bit ago? /It's me, Riley. Possessed girl. You know; the one with the sword?/ She hefted it and watched him, looking for a flicker of recognition, some kind of realization. 

And saw something she hadn't expected. She had seen it all too often among the police in town, and from her peers during her high school career; and with their parents. All over Sunnydale, really. That expression of willful blindness; the one that said, 'I can't credit my eyes, I can't believe what I saw, so what I saw must have been a hallucination or something. No way what I saw was real, so I discounted it. Or... maybe there's a perfectly rational explanation, and I just... haven't found it yet. So anyway, here's me not thinking about it.'

/Oh, so we're gonna roll with the, 'Buffy and her friends were in the wrong place at the wrong time' explanation? Or, what? We were being held hostage by the Hellions, and you got there just as we were fighting our way free, and you heroically led your clandestine military unit into the charge and saved us from an awful fate? And I'm just, what; a girl who takes Tae Kwon Do or Kendo or something and thought I could put it to good use in that moment? What's your ‘reasonable explanation’, Riley?

From behind Riley, one of the guys, the Black one, leaned over to hiss at him. "I  _ told _ you, man. 'Peculiar' my ass.  _ Told _ you we should've reported it!”

Riley ignored this aside. "Buffy, what are you  _ doing _ down here?"

It was just too ridiculous. She couldn't even. “Oh, you know. I wanted to get the scenic tour. Nice place you got here. A lot more ‘fifties bomb shelter’ than a frathouse, huh?”

“Think we might be under the frathouse, pet,” Spike opined, watching the conversation tensely. 

“Really? Huh.” Far be it from her to question her vampire’s honestly insane sense of direction while underground. “Well, that’s just, you know, convenient.” Returning her attention to the Psych TA she had briefly dated, Buffy shook her head in disgust. “Just how many of your buddies are soldiers? All of you, or just some of you, or what?”

Riley’s eyes narrowed at her, but he made no move to answer. 

“Finn! Ten o’clock, man! The Professor!”

Riley’s eyes jerked away from Buffy and her friends, almost as if he couldn’t quite judge which was the most imperative situation at the moment. Buffy followed his gaze, and, well… if she were him she would be focusing on her boss and the whole being dragged backward up a metal stairway by a couple of murderous demons thing, but you know. Not her circus, not her monkeys.

“You’ll never get me out of here,” Professor Walsh was saying in a tight, breathless, half-choked sort of voice that still managed to sound imperious and pissed off. “All of our doors are voice-activated. It won’t recognize my voice like this.”

“Then you’ll talk with my knife to your throat, bitch,” Razor answered, pressing said item to her carotid till a drop of blood showed.

Professor Walsh fell silent, lips pressing to a thin line and countenance going a sort of gravy color.

The soldiers seemed torn. “Ri. C’mon, man. These idiots can’t get out either. That HST has Walsh. We’ll deal with them later!”

“You’ll cut my boys loose and patch ‘em up,” Razor roared, shoving at the knife a little harder, “or she dies. Then we  _ all _ leave!”

“That’s not gonna happen.” Riley Finn’s voice sounded way different when he was being secret-soldier-guy. Nothing open or friendly about him down here. He was hard, emotionless, in command… and utterly disinterested in the whole ‘sentient beings being tortured while they were conscious’ thing that was happening right over there about fifteen minutes ago. 

Honestly, he sounded kind of scary. /Color me happy we never went on any real serious dates./

“Then the bitch bleeds out and we start on the next white-coat.”

“You kill Professor Walsh and you have no other hostages.” Riley cocked his gun, or whatever. Slid something. Made it make a noise that sounded serious and prepared for violence. Buffy didn’t know from guns, but she would bet Razor did.

Seemingly that was the case, for Razor bared his teeth. “How about I grab the Slayer next?” 

Riley blinked, taken aback. “Huh?”

A disbelieving guffaw. “The blonde bitch you were just talking to, you stupid jarhead. You seem to know her.”

Riley’s eyes flickered over to Buffy, away again. His face tightened a little. “I thought I did, but I guess I was wrong. And what the hell is a ‘slayer’?”

/Oh, wow. Do you even  _ listen _ to the demons you capture?/ 

Razor clearly shared her disgust. “Don’t you know a Slayer when you see one? You’re down here fuckin’ up my boys and fuckin’ up every other demon in town, and you’re gonna tell me you haven’t thrown down with queen bitch yet?” And all the sudden, to Buffy’s disgust, he rumbled a godawful, tearing-gravel noise, like phlegm in a cement truck. He was  _ laughing _ . “Hell. She really must have been on vacation to have let all this go down for this long on her turf and not have kicked your asses even once yet.”

“To be fair,” Buffy interrupted grimly, “they’ve been extremely sneaky. I couldn’t figure out where the heck they were hiding, and I didn’t know for sure what they were up to until just this week.”

Riley swiveled again to gape at her, mouth wide open and face paling. She saw him mouth the word ‘slayer’ with clear unfamiliarity before shaking his head as if to clear it. 

“But don’t worry, Riley. Razor won’t get anywhere near me. He’s had a lot of chances, haven’t you, Razor?” she called sweetly. “We’re all good, if you wanna focus on getting my apparent mad scientist of a Psych teacher out of his hands.”

“Bitch, if I really wanted you, I could drag you out of here by your hair and…”

“Yawn. We’ve already had this conversation. Can you continue with your regularly-scheduled getting killed, please? I only came down here to make sure you were dead.”

“What  _ is _ this?” the Black guy--Buffy thought she vaguely recognized him as Riley’s friend… Forrest?--broke in impatiently. “Some kind of demon turf-war?”

“I don’t know,” Riley answered slowly, “but I intend to find out.” He swiveled around to lift his gun intently, pointing it at Razor’s forehead. His voice had gone flat and determined, his eyes cold. “Just as soon as we deal with these jerks.” And he pulled the trigger. His weapon barked just once, and the Hellion next to Razor went down like a bowling pin. “Drop the knife or you’re next.”

“Oh, you’re so gonna wish you didn’t do that,” Razor hissed, and plunged the knife into Maggie Walsh’s throat. Promptly yanked it out so that she went off like a bright red Old Faithful… and leaped at the shocked soldiers while she was still keeling over, gushing. 

/Oh God. Oh, she is so dead…/

Beside Buffy, Spike was muttering something about a waste of perfectly decent blood and good riddance to bad rubbish, after which he did something utterly foolhardy and absolutely insane; especially considering his absolute terror of being re-incarcerated here. He dove away from their ranks, around past the snarl of soldiers currently occupied with putting down the spitting, clawing Razor, and dove for Maggie Walsh’s weakly twitching remains. 

“What the hell is he doing?” Buffy demanded of exactly no one.

“Probably couldn’t take it, with all that blood just pouring out right there,” Xander muttered sourly.

Obviously that wasn’t true. Spike wouldn’t screw them all over for any amount of blood… though Buffy wasn’t entirely sure he wouldn’t seriously consider heading over to give the woman who’d tortured him a kick in the face or something. But she didn’t think he’d do even that much at a time like this. She opened her mouth to tell Xander to shut up, and that Spike was full for today, but before she could get the words her vampire had torn something away from the body and was dodging back toward them behind the tangle of soldiers and now-quiescent demon. “Here,” he called roughly, and, producing an incredibly bloody keycard, he licked it unceremoniously to clean the magnetic strip (everyone around him except for Buffy and Anya made some kind of horrified face or exclaimed in disgust), then reached out and shoved the thing into the box above their heads. 

The box  _ bleeped _ . The light went green, and the door clicked as it popped open. 

/Oh my God, you’re amazing and I love you./ “Everybody,  _ go!” _

They followed Spike as he wrenched the door open and dove inside room 314.

***

So, this place just kept getting creepier. First there was the whole dog-pound thing. That was bad enough. But what the absolute fuck was with this…  _ thing _ on the gurney? This… former guy?

At least, Buffy was pretty sure the inanimate corpse-creature used to be a guy of the human variety, but he so wasn’t anymore. He wasn’t a demon either. He was… He was sort of a mixture of lots of things, judging by his whole ‘half a green face, one green side’ sitch. He was currently missing a hand, had some kind of metal cuff over the wrist with lights on it, pinned down to the table… and his right leg… 

Buffy couldn’t identify what was going on down there for a moment, but eventually she realized that his human leg had been… removed and… /Oh my God./ Replaced with something else. Maybe a Gorakh’s leg, though it was kind of tough to tell, with the way everything on him was all weird and shriveled and mangled together in strange spots. And he had metal under some parts, like maybe his ribcage (there was a metal rib for sure peeking out on the lower left side), and a metal plate on his head, and what looked like… Holy wow. Like a  _ disk-drive _ on his chest where a heart should be, and…

He looked kind of like a zombie; all dead and rotten and stitched together with some kind of metal sutures, and just.. ugh. “What is this? Demon-Frankenstein?”

“Frankenstein would be your Psychology professor, I’d wager, Slayer,” Spike answered, distaste the better part of his vocal inflection. “This would be Frankenstein’s monster. Never understood how that mistake became so damned common of late.” Her vampire sounded horrified and bitter as he stared down at the travesty in front of them.

“It’s a cultural shorthand run amok,” Giles muttered grimly. “A post-modern Prometheus she was not, however. This is terrifying.”

“A-bloody-men.”

“A post-modern… Oh.  _ Oh! _ I just now understood that subtitle,” Willow exclaimed, then shook her head, looking pained. “This is really, really disgusting. What was she even trying to do, here?”

“I dunno, but I think I’m gonna be sick,” was Xander’s input.

Anya, though, gazed down on the body with a clinical interest. “It seems to me that what she was intending to do was to mix the most warrior-like of demon races with her most favored of soldiers to create a prototype superbeing.” She tilted her head slightly. “I wonder if this soldier read Nietzsche.”

Giles winced. “God knows, but either way, here he lies.”

As was her wont to do when people got all nerdy around her, Buffy let the conversation fly over her head in favor of action. “These people need to be stopped,” she pronounced, and she had never felt more firmly convinced of anything as she lifted her eyes from the disgusting sight before her. “The problem is, we’re stuck.” Unfortunately, though the soldiers outside appeared to be unable to use their own cards to get into this area of the compound, the room had no outlets. They had rather neatly trapped themselves 

Spike lifted his head, sniffed a little, stoically ignoring as he did the storm of banging and shouting from the soldiers on the other side of the door. They had never ceased yelling things like ‘Open up!’ and ‘Come out now or we will be prepared to use lethal force!’ and other crap like that, which made it tough to concentrate. “What, do you smell something?” Buffy asked, drawing closer to him. “I mean, besides whatever nastiness,” she went on, wrinkling her nose, because if this room smelled weird to her, with the preservatives and demon-smells and dead flesh and chemicals, she couldn’t even imagine how it smelled to a vampire. /I probably don’t want to./

“Fresh air, pet,” he told her, and nodded to the blind left-hand corner of the room. "Just there.”

Buffy frowned and eyed the spot. All she saw were featureless white tiles and a rack of what looked like IV bottle-things in multiple colors. God knew what they were. Demon-juice. Nothing else, though. “Where do you think it’s…”

He was already moving, striding over to the corner with serious purpose to wrench aside the rack. The bottles rattled as he shoved it away from the corner, exposing a bare gap of about three feet of wall, at which he then commenced to stare with his hands on his hips, nostrils flared. “‘S comin’ from here, love, but not sure how, as all I’m seein’ is blank wall…”

Willow moved up to join him. Studied the tiles. Frowned. And gave the wall a shove at two widely-separated spots.

It swung open to reveal a huge gap behind it.

“Well, fine, then, Nancy bloody Drew,” Spike muttered, sounding half-annoyed and half-impressed. “That’s just sodding ridiculous. A hidden door? For real?”

Willow stood back and smiled. “I win.”

Shaking her head, Buffy pushed away from the table and its load of somnolent puzzle-monster, made for the sneaky inside door of the tiny room. “Alright then. Let’s see what’s behind door number two.” After all, they had no other way out, right?

Sword drawn, Spike was already poking his head through the aperture when she arrived at his side. “Don’t think they were gonna stop at Frankenstein’s Monster, Buffy,” he murmured when he pulled his escaping curls back through the doorway.

“Hm?” She followed his progress, peeped in. 

Past the secret door was a small ledge, then a short metal ladder down into a sort of concrete tank of a room that seemed to have been installed in the ground like some sort of tubular bomb shelter. It had huge, circular windows all along the walls that let in no light, showed only a backing of solid, rough rock to indicate how deeply they were underground.

Lining the walls were several spare-looking operating bays, each with a steel gurney and IV rack. They were all unoccupied at the moment, thank goodness, but their presence was a terrifying reminder that these creepy mad scientists had been up to no good and had planned to continue that badness on a grander scale. There were about ten beds in here, plus a couple of weird chair-things with restraints on them, and…

Spike touched her shoulder, nodded toward the far end of the long space. “That might be a way out, love.”

She followed his gaze, saw a rollaway, circular concrete door embedded in the distant wall that looked as if it might give into the caverns under… well, wherever. /Anywhere that’s not here is good for me./ “Right. Let’s get the hell out of here.” With a quick nod at Wil, she turned her head to address the rest of the Scoobies. “C’mon. It looks like there might be a way out back here.” And she swiveled away from the godawful room with its nasty zombie-demon-guy to head in, sword bared.

She could hear her team following uncertainly as she came to the head of the ladder and started down, Spike and then Willow directly in her wake. 

She was making for the gigantic round door and praying with everything in her that it was an exit when she was arrested by a sudden, familiar voice echoing over some hidden loudspeaker. Familiar, that was, if much more clipped than he had ever used while assisting his now-dead professor in class. ‘Buffy, you’re in a restricted area. Please abort and return to the main laboratory. You’ll be debriefed by the proper authorities…’

Turning slowly in place with sword in hand, Buffy sought the speaker. There. Mounted high in one corner at the opposite end of the room, above what looked like a couple of research stations with computers; one very organized and one a little messy. “Weird. If they can’t get in, how can they use the speakers to talk to us?”

“I would imagine there’s an overall intercom system for the entire base,” Anya put in calmly. She sounded a great deal less anxious and keyed-up now that she was seemingly safe from any soldierly interference. “I wouldn’t pay any attention, Buffy. This beefy commando-guy is clearly playing mind-games with you, trying to psyche you out so you’ll respond.”

Buffy actually had a whole other idea. “Do you think, if there’s an overall intercom system, there might be an overall control system?”

Giles groaned. “Buffy…”

Buffy ignored him to swing on Willow. “I’m betting one of those workstations was Professor Walsh’s. And if I was her and I was running this place, I’d want to have access to the controls of the whole deal. Cameras and overrides and…”

“Maybe controls to the cages,” Willow breathed, and half-ran toward the computer bays.

“Oh my God,” Xander breathed, sounding stunned. “You can’t just…”

Buffy kept her voice tight. “We don’t know if this is a way out, or if there are guards on this door too. We might have to fight our way back through. We don’t know if we can even open it from here without some kind of door override. We might need confusion in there; and more importantly, we need to put a stop to this insanity.” She felt everything in her harden, heard it in her voice as she continued. “I’m not a fan of some of those demon species, but none of them deserve to be cut open while they’re alive.” Her eyes flickered over to meet Spike’s. “If they’re gonna go down, let ‘em go down in a fair fight.”

His eyes locked briefly on hers, and he nodded once, short and tight but with a kind of gratitude lighting their depths.

“That sounds eminently practical to me, Buffy,” Anya approved, sincerity ringing in her frank tones.

“Thank you, Anya.” Turning away from the still-stunned Xander, Buffy strode toward the two workstations. Willow had already flipped a mental coin and was standing before the neater one. While the messy one bore scattered charts, a couple of open books, and a half-drunk cup of black coffee, this one held several piles of neatly-organized clipboards, a few medical charts, a mug with a tea bag slung over the rim, the label insisting that ginseng-green with jasmine was the finest blend, and, wide open in the center space, their intro-psych textbook. On top of it was a final essay, flipped to a middle page somewhere with a whole passage circled in red and some marks written on it in a very familiar hand.  _ ‘Your response to the text is very Pavlovian, Eric. Please think for yourself’, _ it read. 

Damn. /Thank goodness she’ll never get a chance to grade  _ my _ paper!/ 

“Wil? Is it password-protected or anything?”

“I’m getting there, Buffy,” Will answered shakily, and scurried to pull out the seat. Did a little typing. Frowned censoriously. “Yup.” Waved her fingers. The ‘Access Denied’ screen vanished, red promptly replaced with friendly green.

“Handy.”

Wil sounded smug as she bent over to type. “You have no idea. If all hackers were witches… Okay, let’s see. Doors, locks, security...”

Xander was staring at them as if they had lost their minds. “Are you cra…”

‘Buffy,’ Riley Finn’s voice broke in again over the speaker above their heads. ‘Please, cease and desist, and surrender yourself. You are trespassing on government property…’

Buffy smiled, aware all of a sudden exactly what people meant in stories when they said ‘mirthless’, and leaned over Willow’s shoulder. “Is there, like, an ‘answer the loudspeaker’ button anywhere on there?” 

“Uuuhhh…” Willow paused in her typing and mousing, glanced around the screen. “I don’t think…”

“Never mind,” Buffy answered, having seen a likely button on a little, flickering console on the far side of the desk. Moving to the rank of lights, she hunted around the various buttons while Wil stared. 

“We’re gonna end up locked away forever in some kind of military prison…” Xander moaned shakily.

Buffy needed to know. Had Riley known? /Oh! There you are!/ She flipped the ‘intercom’ button. “Hey, it’s TA Riley Finn; the sweet, unassuming guy from Iowa who was just as normal as normal could be. You know, except for that pesky demon-hunting job for some secret military group…”

‘You need to stand down, Buffy. You have no idea how much trouble you’re in…’

Buffy rolled her eyes. “You really sound stressed. I bet  _ you’re _ the ones in trouble. I mean, right now I’m in some super-secret control room, behind a door you can’t get through, past a room where you people have been making some kind of Franken-soldier out of human and demon parts, which I’m guessing isn’t gonna go over big with the flag-wavers of the world…” /Skinner’s Boxes and vampire-training with migraine-chips and Franken-demon-monster-things… What were you people gonna do to Spike?/

/What were you gonna do  _ with _ Spike?/

Whatever it was, she couldn’t let it happen. Not for any money.

A profound silence rang over the loudspeaker. When Riley spoke up again, he sounded slightly less sure of himself. ‘I don’t know what you saw, Buffy, but that’s not the point right now. Right now we need to get you out of there and into a debrief. I don’t even know how you got down here, but you’re in a classified military installation, after having interacted with Hostile Sub-Terrestrials…’

Buffy toggled the switch off for a second. “That’s just great. What a mouthful. How nerdy is that?” Derision dripped from her voice.

“I dunno,” Xander answered thoughtfully. “I think it’s kinda cool.”

Spike grunted in equal disdain. “You would.”

“I found the cameras,” Willow informed her quietly. “I’ll see if I can get some on the screen for where we were and… the cages.”

Buffy nodded and switched the intercom-thinger back on. “They’re called demons, Riley. But you’re cute with the lingo and stuff. Or you would be if all your science-ing it all up didn’t come with slicing and dicing living things while they were awake to feel it, and torturing them, and doing experiments on them…”

‘What… They’re  _ animals! _ HSTs! They don’t even feel it…’

Buffy felt Spike peak from tense to murderous, and leaned back against him, just a little, to show she had his back. He slacked off just a hair from deadly. “I don’t think any government agency allows this kind of abuse to animals. And everyone knows animals feel experiments, or we wouldn’t have PETA and those people who release the weasels and whatever from the Estee Lauder and Maybelline farms…”

Spike snorted, relaxing a little more against her shoulder blades. 

‘Weasels don’t kill people when they’re released into the wild! Buffy…’ 

“But they do wreck the environment,” Willow broke in, face now pale and set, “when they suddenly flood an area.” Her fingers moved all the more swiftly on the keyboard, expression turned resolute. “Monitors on screen, Buffy.”

A bunch of camera shots popped onto Professor Walsh’s monitor; little squares showing demons pacing in bare cells, that terrible demon-torture-pit, some area full of weapons, some bay somewhere with a big garage-door-looking deal, the surgical room with the Franken-guy they had just left… and the door to it, currently clogged with Riley Finn and his boys, there at the base of the stairs. Also, a bedroom in what looked like a dorm or a frathouse, which, ugh. 

Another voice broke in over the intercom, hissed and tense. ‘Man, why are you debating with this chick, Finn? I get that you liked her, but you were the one who said she’s weird, and now we know why, so shut off the damn comms and let’s go in!’

/And there’s our countdown. The natives are getting restless with our little conversation./ Turning to Willow, Buffy lifted a questioning eyebrow. Willow paused in her keyboarding and nodded, bleak but certain.

Buffy gave her a return nod.

‘Shut up, Gates!’ Riley’s voice cut back in, sounding horrified… and desperate for them to come to their senses.  _ ‘Willow? _ I can’t believe you’re  _ in _ on this! I thought you two were nice girls! I mean, c’mon! you’ve  _ seen _ what these things’ve done to your town! We need to cleanse the area, control the infestation, sterilize it…’ Tiny on the monitor, Riley’s helmeted face seemed torn, confused, tense, thoroughly bewildered, and angry.

/‘Nice girls’? For real? And ‘infestation’?/ 

He really thought he was there to do them a favor. That they could deal with the current demon population and that would end them forever. /They think they can just... take over./ 

He really thought she would  _ let _ him, like some kind of budget Captain America. In  _ her _ town. He actually  _ believed _ himself, even after all she had seen in this godawful place, built on the sly under her own city to terrorize  _ her _ demons and try to take away her job. /Who even  _ authorized  _ you? Who let you build…/

The answer hit her like a fist to the temple. /Oh. Mayor Wilkins, you are  _ so _ lucky you’re dead./ He would’ve done it if he’d thought he could use these idiots against her. /Wow, I’m so glad I blew you up!/ And now here they were thinking they owned the place, owned the town, because the jerk Mayor had apparently never even told them about the existence of the Slayer when he’d invited them to just come strolling in to take over the caves under the Goleta side of town, because that battle was between him and her and they were just insurance, probably, and, just… wow.

/Did he even tell them about the whole Boca Del Infierno business? Like… don’t they know they’re completely outclassed?/ There weren’t enough soldiers in the world, not enough cells. /You’re just boys with toys in the face of all the Sunnydale Hellmouth can throw at you, ready to be swarmed under any second. This is the dimensional gateway to a thousand demon worlds, you doofs. The only reason I’m still here is I have superpowers that are maybe even demonic too, and I’m stealth-hunter-chick. I don’t come in waving a bunch of guns and trying to take over and… what’s the word… make every demon cower, because not all of them are gonna. You guys, with this…/ 

/God, he’s kind of a well-meaning asshat, isn’t he?/ “And we will fix this,” Buffy interrupted, “and clean it up. In our own way, the way we always do.  _ Without _ your help, because we haven’t needed you people for years, and we don’t need you now. And because you’re making too much work for yourself, and turning even the pacifist population into combatants, because you seem to have a problem telling the difference between a dangerous demon and one who wouldn’t hurt a fly; or one who’s human all but three days a month and has no control over his change, or…”

‘An HST is an HST, Buffy!’ All the pleading left Riley’s voice as he realized rather belatedly that they had irreconcilable philosophical differences on the matter. His tones hardened over the electronic connection. ‘Now, by the power vested in me by the United States Government, I order you to stand down and turn yourselves in!’ His voice was shaking with what sounded like a betrayed sort of rage, and his face on the tiny screen was flat and deadly with decision.

Buffy flicked off the switch. Riley Finn was mad at her for being a part of a world he feared. He would turn her over to his authorities without qualm, and he would dust Spike with no compunction, no matter that this particular vampire wasn’t hurting anyone and wouldn’t. Heck; he’d do it to  _ Clem _ . And he was going to turn her hellmouth into an unending warzone in his quest to remove all demonkind from the face of the earth. ‘Sterilization’; only humans need apply. 

For the first time, Buffy realized that she didn’t want that. /I don’t want all demons gone. If they were, what would I be? What would I do?/ Once upon a time, she would have thought it meant she could have a normal life, but now she knew she would actually be left roiling uselessly with nothing to fight, a victim of her impulses. /A Slayer without a mission is dangerous. Faith taught us that./ 

/And besides, they're probably after me, now too./ Because what these creeps were after? It wasn’t balance, or control, or safety. 

It was genocide. And they needed to be stopped. “Do it, Wil.”

Wil’s fingers hovered briefly over the keys, then she nodded and began typing again. Her hand darted over to the mouse.

“Buffy,” Xander broke in fearfully, “are you serious about this? Some of those soldiers are gonna die if you turn all those angry demons loose. Men with families.” At her uncompromising mien he shifted, clearly uncomfortable. “I mean, they’ll get, like…  _ eaten.” _

Buffy felt her lips compress into a thin line. “I’m sure they will. A lot of those demons in there looked pretty hungry.”

It was Giles’ turn to get into the act along about then. “Buffy!”

She swung on the both of them, cutting off all debate with a diagonal swipe of her hand. “Look! Those ‘soldiers’ knew what they were signing on for when they joined up, and they volunteered. And they took it out on the demons when it didn’t turn out like they thought.” /And I’m talking about myself, and I know it, but that doesn’t excuse… I didn’t even get to  _ volunteer!  _ No one asked  _ me! _ / “Those men in there participated in cutting Spike open while he was awake, and experimenting on who knows how many other demons…”

“They were only following orders!” Xander gasped, clearly stunned at her blasé attitude. “You don’t get how the military works! You have to do what you’re told! You don’t get any choice…”

“Like being forced to kill every night since you’re fifteen because you were ‘born to’?” she snapped back. “Like having no way out, and answering to a bunch of old men you’ve never seen who can put you through deadly, debilitating tests and have the power of life and death over you and still think they’re better than you, that they own you because you’re just a weapon?”

Xander fell back, gaping. Giles, when she flicked her eyes to her Watcher, had closed his own mouth and was looking extremely pained. “I  _ know _ , Xander. Believe me. And guess what?” She whirled away to glare down at the computer screen where Willow was hunched with fingers poised and trying really hard not to look at her. “Amazingly, I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy, since even then, I’ve still managed to have a conscience.” She bit her lip, not looking at Spike. “It’s a little belated, because I kind of think I got brainwashed myself for a while, but it’s coming out now, and you know what? If it doesn’t freak either of you out, the experimenting and the demon-frog thing—which we all know they saw, by the way, since it was happening right there out in the open—they were also part of doing what we saw to another human being.” She felt herself going bleak. “Also, I figure they have more than a fair chance, since they have guns and Kevlar and the demons only have claws and teeth.”

“They won’t need more,” Spike muttered grimly.

/Yeah, I bet not./ “You think the harmless ones’ll make it out?” she asked him in a quiet aside, abruptly anxious about it. She couldn’t help thinking about that poor werewolf, only half wolfed-out because sonic agony. How would she hold up in a fight? And maybe Loose-Skins might have some hidden defenses she didn’t know about, but Flippers out there would be toast going up against a machine gun.

“They’ll slip out in the confusion. Have as good a chance as any, pet.”

“Okay. Good.” She could breathe as long as she didn’t think of sweet, movie-watching, Bugle-eating Clem. /He’s not down here. Not yet, anyway. And he won’t be if I have anything to do with it./ 

“Buffy.” Spike’s hand brushed her shoulder. “You’re doin’ the right thing.”

She nodded, felt the tension fade just slightly under his hand. She realized only then that her entire body was like a rock. 

Off to one side, Anya spoke up in her usual almost-strident fashion. “For what it’s worth, I think your response is exceedingly fair, Buffy.”

Buffy turned her eyes on Anya, straightened a little against Spike. “Thank you,” she answered quietly, and relaxed a little more. Two former members of the demon community, one still part-time and one an exile, thought she was giving those captives out there a fair shake, and didn’t think she was being too hard on the soldiers who had, after all, enlisted for this kind of emergency. 

Besides, the Scoobies needed to get out of here intact, and they were kind of fish in a barrel right now, so whatever Xander and Giles thought of her solution…

“Got it!” Wil broke in anxiously. She glanced up at Buffy. “So… once I do it, I won’t be able to take it back, Buffy.”

Buffy didn’t worry at her lip, though it was a near thing. She just straightened decisively, focused her eyes on the bank of camera-monitors on the computer screen. Cellblock, pit and entrance, milling soldiers fruitlessly attempting to bang their way into that ‘314’ door. Plenty of coverage. They could go back in if this exit didn’t go anywhere and they needed to escape that way. “Do it.”

Wil did… whatever. There was a loud beep from somewhere in the room, and then a siren went off and a light started to flash from high up on the wall, inside a little wire cage; one of those rotating ones. ‘Containment breach!’ a worried-sounding, pre-recorded woman’s voice informed them over the loudspeaker. ‘Containment breach in cell-blocks one through twenty-eight…’

Spike’s hand on her shoulder twitched. Squeezed.

On the monitors, the soldiers broke very suddenly from their huddle at the zombie-makin’ door to swing around, rifles grasped and pulled up at the ready. There was a brief, breathless pause… and then the exit to the cellblock exploded with a sudden, ragged swarm of desperate, furious demonkind ready to spend their lives on either escape, or failing that, revenge.

The ragtag mishmash of demons boiled out of the stony corridor, howling. The soldiers opened fire, and some of the leaders went down, but some staggered on. And then there were too many, spread out too thinly to be mown down in one spray of bullets. The mob swung around the pit, some heading for the far side and clearly seeking some exit. Others—a small gaggle of maybe fifteen—came around the near side and barreled straight into the tiny knot of soldiers. 

Buffy noted it was missing the Torflinn and the Loose-Skinned one, as far as she could tell, not that it was easy in all that mess. She didn’t see the werewolf either. She was glad of it. Maybe they had headed back the other way, toward the door she and her team had disabled.

As the two groups went hand-to-hand and began grappling dangerously over the real estate of the stairway (the demons’ clear objective, she thought, and didn’t the soldiers see that their captives just wanted to get out of there?), Buffy caught movement out of the corner of her eye, from one of the screens on the far side of the bank. Turned… and saw another whole squad of ten or so soldiers marching into the central complex, armed and ready.

Well… darn. /Where are they hiding all these jerks around town, and why did I never notice?/

“Maybe they called for reinforcements from the Guard base?” Xander put in, sounding pained, though probably less for the eventual fate of the demon escapees than for their chances of making a quick exit under cover of battle-chaos.

“I rather doubt the local military has any idea this place exists, Xander,” Giles put in, sounding pinched and old. “This seems quite the clandestine operation, and not at all the sort of thing you advertise to the standard soldier. You’d have to have extremely high security clearance to get into something this well-hidden, for one.”

“Oh. Right. That makes sense.”

Buffy felt her lips draw back over her teeth. She was starting to feel exceedingly feral. “I wonder if that whole fraternity where Riley lives… what’s it called, Wil? Something-house…”

“Lowell.” 

“Right. Lowell. It’s not a delta-sigma-anything…”

“Right,” Wil gasped, and swung back to her computer. “No nationally-recognized charter…”

“So,” Buffy went on, grim and icy, “what are the chances everyone in it was actually a soldier? And if so, how many guys could it house? Because that might give us an idea of exactly how many jerks we have to face in there, give or take a few demon-casualties and maybe a couple of guys who got housing in the city or something…”

“Lowell House,” Wil broke in, “founded in a UC Sunnydale charter only last year, used to be an orphanage-slash-foster-home back in the day, houses sixteen young men who do graduate-level work at the university in applied sciences, social sciences, neurology…”

“Sixteen. Great. So, do we think that’s all of ‘em?”

Spike grunted doubtfully. “Probably a few officers housed in town, like you said, pet. Call it twenty?”

On the screens, the dual gaggle of commandos—no doubt the entire complement of soldiers carefully hidden amongst the student-body of UCSD—were being swiftly whittled down from the high teens to about half that number by enraged, desperate demons with nothing left to lose. And if more might come from slightly further away… “Guess now’s our chance, then. What do you guys think? Bail now, try this door? If it doesn’t work we can make for the same exit we came in. We know the Hellions are dead. We can make an anonymous call about this crazy place, or… I dunno, but we have to make it out first.”

“What, you’re actually asking our opinions now?” Xander snarked.

/Oh my God, really?/ “When it’s all our lives on the line I always do,” Buffy snapped back. “Look, Xander. You got a weigh-in before every battle. You were free not to join, just like always. You joined. You’re here. Now you get a weigh-in about how to get out.” An epiphany struck, almost bowling her over with the simplicity of it. All the weight long dragging at her elbows seemed to drain away, leaving behind something else. /I can’t share the burden of it; of knowing that when I make the decisions, the fallout will be on me. Not if I do this. Not anymore. But… that comes with it. And it’s better than constantly fighting for my voice at the worst possible time, just so I can say later on, ‘we all agreed it was the best way’. “But during the battle I’m in charge, because  _ I’m the Slayer _ , you got it? And when it comes to how to deal with the demons, I’m the bottom line, because  _ I’m the Slayer _ .”

Xander blinked at her, amazed. “But…”

“So I’m polling us all now,” Buffy drove on relentlessly. “Do we wanna bail while these guys are still engaged, and gamble on them missing us, or hang on and see how it all falls out, hope maybe we can get out the way we came in? I for one would prefer to bank on less soldiers and no jail time, but I’m not gonna decide that for everyone.”

Anya was already moving down the length of the tank-like room toward the gigantic, round door. “We don’t know where this goes, but since we know we have a probable exit this way, and I definitely don’t want to wait for more of these people or to end up in a military prison with them asking me about my origins, I’m with Buffy.”

Spike’s mouth shifted to that slight, gambler’s grin of his. “You know I’m with you, Slayer.”

“Oh, good Lord,” Giles moaned, then nodded. “Fine, I am as well. Let us be off before something worse happens. At least we’ve learned some intelligence of great import down here which will be vital as we move forward in dealing with these interlopers.”

“Could’ve just said at least it wasn’t a wasted trip since now we know what the wankers’ve been up to, Rupert,” Spike snarked.

“Yes, but my way had class.”

“Maybe I can make sure that door up there is still out of commission before we bail,” Wil murmured, and did some more key-tapping. “In case we need to use it, if this one doesn’t work…”

That sounded like agreement. “Do you have any more of that herb-stuff? It’d be easier to sneak back through if we were invisible again. I mean, if we need to.” /Though, who knows if we can get past all the bodies without falling apart like last time./

Wil frowned. “Not sure if there’s enough.”

“Then hopefully this door is good to us. If we’re all agreed.” She turned to her other oldest friend. “Xan?”

He sighed heavily. “Well, I’m definitely not gonna try to get away by myself. But I’m definitely down with trying the back way first no matter where it goes, just in case. I’m not a fan of dancing through a battle, even if those guys are busy.”

“Dancing’s the best part,” Spike grunted, all antsy.

Buffy threw him a warning look before nodding Xander’s way. “I agree. We do a quick sweep. But we can’t afford to waste a ton of time on it, or they’ll have all the demons down and be coming after us, and we’ll lose our distraction. If we can’t get it open quick or it doesn’t seem like it goes anywhere, we head back the way we came.”

“That’s fair. Hey, you wanna give me that keycard, Undead?”

With a bland, long-suffering look, Spike proffered the bloodied item between two fingers.

Xander took it gingerly, not even bothering to shoot Spike a token disgusted look before he turned and darted after Anya. Between the two of them they had the vast, rolling door open before the rest of the group could join them, and Xander was already making exclamations. “So, uh, how are you guys with spelunking, and then maybe some camping? ‘Cause I think this thing comes out in the woods somewhere.”

***

The tunnel-cave thing eventually emptied out way the hell out in the middle of Breaker’s Woods somewhere, like two miles from campus. According to Spike, their vehicles were all parked south and west of their position, which made sense since they had left both of them behind the College of Applied Sciences and just to the northwest of Lasley Dorm. 

In other words, they were a nice moonlit jaunt away from anyone’s ride. “This is gonna be a crazy walk,” Willow murmured as they struck out toward the southeast end of the campus and the Sunnydale side of things.

“You were right, Xander,” Buffy admitted, because he deserved it and she had no problems giving credit where it was due. Also, she kind of thought he needed to hear it, and that it would help mend some fences between them to give him the ego boost. 

“Yeah, well,” Xan answered with a slightly embarrassed-looking half-shrug. 

“He can be pretty smart when he tries,” Anya answered for him, and lightly cuffed him on the shoulder, beaming. “Good job! Well done!” At all their surprised expressions she blinked. “What? My managerial training books say that one must encourage the behavior one wishes to see, just as often as one must deride the behavior one wishes to see vanish, or the employee’s behavior will never change. And since I intend to start a business, I thought I should begin practicing my interpersonal skills at every opportunity.”

“Oh, so I’m an employee now?” Xander demanded, sounding suspicious and irritated.

“Of course not, Xander,” the ex-demon answered, and patted him again. After which she returned to the exact same patronizing and faux-ebullient tones. “You’re a valued member of the team.”

“Oh God,” he groaned, and covered his face with one hand.

Buffy did her best to hide a smile as she strode ahead.

A concerted twenty minutes or so of fast-walking saw them regaining their vehicles, at which point everyone who could do so very pointedly slipped into Giles’ tiny car, leaving Spike and Buffy to enjoy the relatively roomy environs of the DeSoto on their lonesome. As the smaller vehicle headed off to dispatch the remaining Scoobies back at their respective apartments, Buffy sighed, rolled her neck on her shoulders, and stepped into the vast, black beast. And was promptly dragged across the huge bench seat to fetch up against Spike’s side, a fierce, gripping set of fingers punching into her waist and a hungry mouth inches from her own. “Bloody fuck, Slayer, for a while there I thought…”

The blaring warning of last time had damn near vanished; reduced to murmurs of vague discontent relegated to somewhere in the very tiniest rear section of her lizard brain. She couldn’t even call what remained disquiet, much less fear, wasn’t sure anymore if the disconcontented portion was for how slowly things were going or for how quickly as she jammed her fingers into his hair, drew in a deep, shuddering lungful of his scents. Leather, smoke, blood, the night. Right now, oddly, her mousse. Spikeness, overall. “I know. Me too. Get over here.” And she yanked his head down, captured his mouth in a hard, ferocious kiss that demanded immediate satisfaction. 

“Christ,” he whispered into her throat when she came up for air, and his hands were under her shirt, under her bra, and this was so not going to take long. Memories cascaded through her, of brief, fleeting, hurried over-the-clothes groping and grinding while under the spell, giggling and breathing each other’s air--all they had been able to get away with in front of an increasingly blind Giles--and need flared through her, blinding. She ground out his name, heard him do the same, bucked thoughtlessly when he found her nipples... and alright, okay, so probably this wasn’t even going to make it to the main event. /I know I’m not gonna./ “Hurry!” she whispered, straining.

“No,” he whispered back, mouth slipping to her collarbone. “Made you a sodding promise.” He sounded equally strained, almost angry, but he had her jeans open, and his fingers were inside, and oh hell no, he was so not going to get her off again without… Without…

/Oh God…/

If she had thought it was good when he was just doing stuff to her over her clothes, she had simply not been prepared for his hands. He had…  _ good _ hands. Seriously good hands, which were right now making very sure that any resolve she might have had toward making this a mutual thing was just going right out the window and dissolving into the street, because the things he could do with his fingers were quite frankly ridiculous and impossible and how could he be so many places at once, so fast?

She had waited too long for this; for him. Arched up inarticulately against him, lost, aching, on edge, and oh god, he slipped a little inside her, thrust hard and fast, and she hadn’t had that since… Not since… She bit her lip, because she was going to… She was going to… God, her body was, like,  _ hungry _ for that, and…

And then she heard him say in what sounded like a triumphant tone, “That’s it, Slayer, oh Christ, so bloody hot for me…”

And she was abruptly a little bit angry, somewhere under the mind-melting pleasure of what he was doing. “Damn you,” she hissed, and fumbled blindly at his jeans. “Let me…”

“Fuck…” he growled, but did not pull away, and she crowed in triumph when the button gave way at her nerveless urgings and she got one hand inside, found him, cool and hard and damp and so incredibly  _ mobile _ … 

/So  _ alive _ .../

“Oh,  _ fuck _ , Buffy…”

She had no real clue what she was doing, or whether it was even right, but the best part was she really wasn’t in the thinking place anymore, which meant no time to second-guess or worry. She just acted on instinct, and it seemed to be working for her to just roll with the rhythm he had going, because very abruptly his mouth was open against her neck and he was breathing hard against her as if he needed to, and his hand lost rhythm for a sec. “Oh fuck, oh Christ, just like that Buffy, oh Slayer…” And then he picked up again, matching her rhythm now… and she could barely hear him anymore because she was tightening up, and her breath was catching, she couldn’t see  _ anything _ anymore, and she had to… She had to…

He roared when she bit down on his shoulder, and came in her hand. And somehow that was incredibly sexy to her; enough that she almost didn’t feel like a bad girl for biting a vampire, enough that she almost didn’t care, because A), it was tough to feel much of anything but really damn good right now, and B), what a confidence-builder, that she’d managed to get a vampire off with a handjob who had probably lived for two hundred years or something and had no doubt done sex stuff she couldn’t imagine without complicated schematics. “Well, okay,” she whispered as her vision cleared and she could command herself to let go of his (tasty) shoulder. “So, that happened.” /And kind of really fast./ Man, her voice was shaky. And she would be embarrassed at how, like,  _ husky _ she sounded if she had the energy to care. But she so didn’t. Not right now.

Spike turned his head a little to nuzzle deeper into her neck, drew in a long breath of her scent; probably enjoying the smells of them together, all mingled and satisfied and stuff. “You tell anyone you got me off practically in my trousers, Slayer, and I’ll have your ears.”

She felt the beginnings of a smirk forming on her lips. “Who says you get to have all the fun?” Pulling away a little, she attempted to eye him, but only got so far as approximately his ear before his ironclad grip dragged her home again and he resumed his nuzzling, and who would’ve thought that William the Bloody was such a cuddler? /Well, I guess maybe I would have, but I won’t tell anyone  _ that _ , either./ “Besides, your threats are empty.” She snuggled a little deeper into his embrace and sighed a little. She was draped kind of half over the console, which was awkward as hell now that the heat of the encounter had dissipated, but she’d take it. “My vampire. Not too evil, not too good, but just right.”

He snorted into her throat. “Depends on what you mean by ‘good’, Slayer.” And he nipped a little and wiggled his fingers in a way that indicated that he knew he was very good indeed at some things. Which, since said fingers were still very firmly parked in places, and as far as her body was concerned, belonged there for the foreseeable future, gave her quite the jolt. 

“Eee!”

He chuckled unrepentantly and gave her neck a tiny nip as if to slow her roll. 

It didn’t help.

“Braggy McBraggerson,” she grumbled, and resisted the reflexive urge to kick him away, since she kind of liked him there. It was probably slutty or something to admit that she wouldn’t mind detaching his hand and keeping it in her pants for, oh, say, the next year or so, right? “And I’ll be the judge of that,” she finished in what she hoped was an arch tone.

He sounded delighted at her playfulness. “Have you screamin’, I will. Parker, soddin' Angel. Know what you've had; know what you need.”

/Okay, smug./ “You do know that if you don’t live up to all this advertising at this point you’re gonna sound like such a jerk.”

He lifted away finally to caress her brows with his free thumb. “I will, love. I promise. I’ll see to you all night. Make you laugh, make you cry, make you beg. Make you love me.”

She smiled into his liquid gaze. “Well, that’s easy enough, stupid, since I already do.”

Grunting, he sat up a little and, warning her with his eyes, gently slipped his fingers away. She made an ‘Oh’ of loss, and he kissed her lightly in apology, then did up her pants with gentlemanly solicitude. “Make you love me more, then,” he finished softly. “It’ll make up for all the times you’ll wanna call me a pig,” he told her with a broad grin, and then, lifting his damp fingers to his nose, inhaled long and deep. His eyes rolled back in his head. “Christ, oh bloody hell, forget I said anything. We have time, right here and now. The sodding seats lie back…” His voice throbbed with sincerity.

Buffy might once have called him a pig. Now she just watched him in surprise, actually feeling… warmed. “Probably we don’t,” she murmured. “But… thanks for the compliment, I guess?”

“Bloody, bloody, sodding  _ fuck _ ,” he whispered, and to her shock, slipped his fingers into his mouth and sucked them clean. “Oh hell, that’ll have to tide me over, then.” And he actually moaned. “Christ, I could live on you, pet.”

Wow, did he actually… like it that much? 

He really must, because that wasn’t faked. And okay, so now her belly was swooping, because all his big talk about hours, and making her feel things while he… It was one thing if it was all about winning some kind of bet with her, or proving he was better than the other guys she’d been with. But if it was really just because he actually liked it that much, and he’d be getting off on it as much as she was… “You’re really like, one in a million, aren’t you?” she heard herself say, wonderingly.

He snorted. “Just a bloke as likes his work,” he answered, and lifting up with a grunt, he moved to tuck himself back into his own jeans. Made a sour face in the gloom. “Be a love and check the cubby there for some napkins or summat, yeah? Made a right mess of meself, with your lovely, hot hand all over me…”

Blushing, Buffy scooched over to tug the ancient glove box open—it came loose with a stiff  _ creak-pop _ —rummaged around a little in the dark, and found something that felt like napkin-esque. “I think this is…” She frowned. “You don’t eat. Why would you have Wendy’s napkins?” The things were very distinctive, with the logo stamped into them easily read, like Braille under the fingertips.

Taking the wad of paper, Spike brushed ineffectually at the top of his jeans and the hem of his tee, then with a sigh, wadded them back up and tossed them down into the rear footwell. Did up his pants and then, with a grimace, swiftly moved to button his duster closed. “Might not have to eat, but doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally get the yen for some of that godawful chili late at night after a bender. Great hangover food, that, passé meat and all. And they’ve lovely milkshakes as well.” 

Buffy was still busy trying to imagine a hungover vampire eating Wendy’s chili and drinking a Frosty while he finished up with his buttons. It was an image she couldn’t quite hold in her head.

Spike ignored her fond surprise to slap a little at the front of his rumpled leather coat... and then to Buffy’s surprise, lifted his eyes to hers, looking uncertain. “You think your mum will notice?”

The short giggle escaped her before she could restrain it. “My hair is probably more of a telltale than anything you have going on, but whatever. We’ll just blame anything and everything on ‘just been in a battle’ and let her draw her own conclusions. It didn’t happen in her house, right?” His desperate need to stay on her mother’s good side was adorable and it killed her, but there was such a thing as taking it too far.

Grumbling at her open amusement, he slid over and turned the car on, put it in gear.  _ “You _ can laugh. She’s the one is offerin’ me a place to live out of Rupert’s clutches, innit?” Shoulders hunched, he started them off down the road toward the remains of downtown Sunnydale, looking hunted. “Should’ve kept a soddin’ button-down in here when I was unpacking.”

* * *

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
(That stairway thing was like unstoppering a tornado or... something. And then we rubbed some feral Slayer on top, slicked them down with a couple battles, and...  
  
The first part of the damn story might as well not have happened, is what.   
  
To say that I despaired of keeping their things in their pants for the remainder of the story is putting it mildly. I had to promise them a sequel full of enormous amounts of sex to even _remotely_ get them to cooperate for the rest of this damn thing. Just saying.   
  
Which is my way of telling y'all that the sequel is at LEAST fifty percent porn (as wolf_shadoe can no doubt attest). And that is entirely nothing whatsoever to do with me, and is not my fault in the slightest. (Some vamps and Slayers are just randy so-and-so's, is all.) But that (to quote Michael Ende) is another story, and will be told in another time. First we have to get through this one with everyone's libidos somewhat intact, and still come out the other side with something resembling a plot. Which is heavy damn lifting, with these two slithering all over each other, let me tell you!  
  
Two chapters to go!!!)


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I owe y'all replies. I'll get to that, I promise. Quarantine be messin' with my time alone. And, jeez. I got suckered into a challenge fic, plus working on the sequel to this, so I guess plenty of fodder for Camp Nano, and jeez. 
> 
> Well, yeah. So. Second-to-last chapter, WOOT!!! (And the last one was even gonna be just an epilogue, but these two got away from me, like they do. I don't know who I thought I was kidding.) Heck, I like round numbers anyway. So. Penultimate chapterness which kind of feels almost finish-y, but Ch. 24 hopefully feels moreso, by dint of hard labor, lol. 
> 
> Oh. I did a significant amount of screwing with this post-beta, so please, none of you give any dirty looks to wolf_shadoe if I missed something, ok? Because it's ALL on me.

They were just about to turn off of Main and down onto Heatherly when they saw them; three bedraggled-looking commandos limping down the center of the firebombed street with their guns at the ready, closing with what looked like one Hellion—where had he come from? Buffy had thought they’d accounted for all of them!—two gray demons with big, pointy shoulders and horns, a Praxis demon, and a Slugnosh.

With a sigh, Spike hit the brakes and put the DeSoto in park. “Bloody hell. Will this night ever end?”

“We’ll make it quick.”

“Yeah.”

They stepped out of the idling beast of a car and walked around the grille to meet one another at the fore. Spike joined her, very naturally, at her left, and they strode side by side to meet the party from behind the embattled demons. “Hey,” Buffy called. “I know you guys probably want revenge, and I don’t blame you, but how about you let me and Spike here handle it, huh? For old times’ sake, since my team was the one who let you out?”

All five demon heads swiveled to stare at her, as did the straggling, demoralized soldiers. The demons mostly looked wary to have the Slayer and her Master-vamp-ally at their backs, boxing them in. 

The soldiers looked horrified. Which was understandable, she supposed, since one of them was Riley Finn, and the other two were those two friends of his; Forrest, and… Graham, she thought? Hard to remember, since she’d only seen him talking to them once, half-jogging away from a conversation with her and calling out their names with a friendly wave, but still. Yeah. Anyhoo. She mostly ignored the commando guys to focus on the demons, since right now her priority was keeping everyone involved alive; soldiers and escapees. 

Enough people had died tonight down in that horrible place where these jerks worked. “Whaddya say, huh guys?”

The Praxis frowned, clearly considering it. The Slug just looked confused. The Hellion looked like he was seriously contemplating slipping away before she could kill him, which, you know, was fair. The other two, though, looked like they didn’t have a single clue what she had just proposed. 

At her side, Spike barked a few words in some uncouth-sounding, very rough and guttural language, and the two imposing, horned, and uncomprehending creatures cleared up as if someone had just explained quadratic equations. They swiftly began nodding and, Buffy thought, maybe smiling nervously? Tough to tell with all those gruesome, pointy teeth.

Horny One and Horny Two turned away without further debate and vanished between two buildings. “Hey!” the one soldier—Forrest—exclaimed, and lifted his gun as if prepared to shoot them in the backs. “They’re getting aw…”

Buffy stepped in and grabbed the gun before he could... and unceremoniously bent the barrel downward at a forty-five degree angle so it would never fire again. “Nuh-uh. No more shooty the currently-peaceful, retreating monsters, thank you very much. Not on my turf. See, the rules are, they’re not actually hurting anyone, they don’t get hurt. Or at least, that’s how it goes on my hellmouth, with my demons.”

The soldiers stared at her as if she had grown another head. Buffy ignored them to nod at Slug and Praxis.

The Praxis inclined her head in reply. She had huge gouges all down one side of her scaled face, as if some of her facial spikes had been removed for something. It made her look lopsided and incongruous, and Buffy really didn’t blame her for wanting some payback, but right now, with this show of force to contend with, she was clearly willing to cede the combat to the superior warrior. 

Praxis stepped back. Pivoted on a clawed heel. Departed, jogging awkwardly down Main with her remaining spines bouncing. 

“Sluggo?” Buffy hinted, and waited. 

Sluggo bubbled a sigh, then backed up and slithered off, leaving behind only the Hellion. “What about me?” he demanded, looking terrified behind darting, piggy eyes and metal implants. 

“That depends. How many people have you raped and killed in my town since you got here?”

The long-eared demon shrank back. 

Buffy turned to Spike and nodded. 

Nodding back, Spike swiftly drew and raised his sword.

“What the hell?” the other soldier, Graham, exclaimed, and swung his gun to bear on Spike and the Hellion.

Buffy calmly swatted the rifle aside. 

“Buffy…” Riley began, weakly.

“Shut up, Riley. He needs to do this.” She never took her eyes off her guy. “Go ahead, Spike, but make it quick, okay? We still have to deal with these idiots.”

“Your wish is my command, Slayer.” Stepping back to give himself room, Spike assumed a battle-crouch and tilted his head in invitation. “Alright, then,” he addressed the beleaguered Hellion. “Let’s get on with it.”

Biker-Boy didn’t move. He just stared at Spike as if he’d lost his damn mind. “You’re… You’re armed. I’m not. And you have your tame Slayer on my back, and those… soldier guys ready to frag me, and…”

Spike’s expression went bleak. “Didn’t seem to stop your boys when _I_ was unarmed, you shite-nosed, arse-faced piece of wankstained rubbish. Don’t imagine it ever does. So get up off your duff and come at me, an’ die proper, or let those human bellends do you. Your choice.”

The Hellion’s face suffused with dark blood. “If I’m gonna die either way…”

Spike rolled his tongue a little, his expression the picture of anticipation and dark relish as he twitched his fingers in a ‘come on’ gesture. “You are. And then I’m gonna ride that nice Hellion Harley I’ve nicked; ride it hard, every night under the moon with the Slayer, and we’re gonna think of how many Hellions we’ve fucked over in the last coupla days, and we’re gonna smile…”

As he spoke, the demon’s face went darker, and darker, until finally it broke. He dove at Spike with a snarl. He was ready and waiting, of course, and caught the idiot thing with a swift uppercut, followed by a downward blow with the pommel of his sword that had the Hellion on his knees. Before the jerk could even realize what was happening, Spike had run him through the back, the tip of the katana ringing on the asphalt, and the body was juddering down the blade to sink to its knees, mouth dripping dark blood to gleam in the streetlights. 

Straightening, Spike pulled out the sword, kicked the body off when it caught on a rib or something. Bent over to grab the tail of dirty shirt sticking out from under the leather vest, and swiftly cleaned his blade, though he didn’t sheathe it yet as he rejoined Buffy, all deadly competence. “Thanks, love.”

“No need to thank me,” she answered softly, eyes still on the incredulous soldiers. “He was yours.”

At Spike’s approach, all three guns had risen again, including the broken one, and were trained instinctively on him and, to a lesser extent on the unknown quantity that was ‘Buffy, college student and whatever a ‘slayer’ is’. Buffy rolled her eyes and slapped the two functional barrels away again. “Will you _stop_ that?” she demanded, and when they popped back up automatically, sighed and bent Graham’s barrel. She moved to follow suit with Riley’s and, when he yanked it away from her against his chest, glaring and clearly horrified at her show of strength, ripped it away from his hands in an easy wrestling match and threw it with a clatter far away from him, halfway down the street. He was strong, she would give him that. Much stronger than any human guy had any right to be, though nowhere near as strong as Spike, and certainly no match for a Slayer. “I warned you,” she told him, low and with the threat plain in her voice. “This is my town;  _ not _ yours. If I were you, I’d get out.” 

The straggling soldiers blinked, clearly taken aback by the authority in her voice, by the way she had addressed demons and been obeyed, by her apparent command of a supernatural being—they might not know yet what Spike was, but for sure he was strong and lightning-fast, the way he had taken out that Hellion, with reflexes that were superhuman—and that she knew the supernatural world they fought against. “What  _ are _ you?” Riley whispered, sounding horrified that he had briefly dated her. 

Buffy shook her head. “You already heard. ‘Slayer, the’. Look it up. I fight demons… but only when I have to. It’s my sacred duty, and sometimes I have to be judge, jury, and executioner. Sometimes I get it wrong, hopefully most of the time I get it right; but it doesn’t make me some kind of…” She looked them up and down in disgust. “…Spanish Inquisition or something.” 

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” Spike quipped blandly.

Buffy jerked around to blink at him, nonplussed. “Huh?”

“Nothing.”

Graham, though, was now staring at Spike as if he was even more startling than Buffy. “HSTs watch ‘Monty Python’?” he asked, sounding amazed. 

_ “Hullo!” _ Spike answered, clearly scandalized. “I’m sodding  _ British _ . Of bloody  _ course _ I’ve watched ‘Monty Python’! It’s a bleeding  _ requirement!” _

“Uh… right. That makes sense.”

Buffy huffed and eyed Graham, who looked like he had been given serious food for thought. “What does HST stand for again? Hostile...” This guy, at least, sounded like he was vaguely reasonable.

“Hostile Sub-Terrestrial,” the soldier murmured on autopilot, but his eyes said he was questioning the ‘hostile’, and possibly other parts of that definition right now.

“Well, that’s just really, really…” Shaking her head, Buffy bit her lip. “I mean, at least when I profiled, I was only labeling a zillion species with one big huge umbrella term, but I wasn’t, like, assuming all demons lived underground, or not noticing there was a  _ reason _ for that, or automatically assuming every demon ever was always gonna be hostile, right?”

Spike pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his inside breast pocket, shook it, peered inside, and when the hell had he acquired those? “Might wanna have a debate sometime on that last one, pet.”

Okay; he had her on that one. “Well, I’m getting better, at least.”

“Loads better.”

With a sigh, Buffy turned back to Graham, ignoring Riley. “You can tell your bosses that plenty of demons live aboveground when they can get away with it. That they have businesses and families and all the rest, and you probably don’t even notice because they’re not being hostile. That the hostile ones might be hostile because you were hostile first. Or they might not. It’s a case-by-case. And that they’re definitely gonna be hostile when you cut ‘em open without anesthetics to see what makes ‘em tick, because they’re living, feeling beings who aren’t gonna respond well to being tortured.”

Graham winced. He had the look of a man who had been faced with a few too many revelations in one night.

“That’s crap!” Forrest broke in. He had a big wound across one cheek that ran up into his hairline; one that looked like it had come from a claw. “They’re just animals…”

Buffy cut him off, a surge of anger exploding out of her.  _ “Animals,” _ she insisted, getting right into his face, “still  _ feel _ . You just don’t like that they exist at all, and you wanna punish them for it. And I want you out of my town if that’s all you’re here to do.”

The low threat in her voice would have made anyone step back. Forrest glared hatred at her, but he did indeed move a little away.

“Buffy, you don’t understand. The HSTs we’ve captured…”

Buffy swung around to glare at Riley. “You’re one of the ones who hurt Spike.” It wasn’t a question.

“Sp…” Riley’s eyes narrowed at her, then he focused on her vampire. Recognition abruptly filled his gaze, now that he was no longer distracted.  “That _ thing?_ That’s…” Shouldering abruptly forward, he tried to get between her and Spike. “Buffy, that’s Hostile Seventeen! He’s… He’s a v…”

/Oh, for God’s sake./ “A vampire, yes. And you’re not going to hurt him anymore. You’re not going to hurt anyone. You’re going to pack up and leave this town before you’re arrested, because I guarantee you by tomorrow you’re either gonna be all over the news, or you’re gonna be folding up your tents when someone much higher up on the food chain finds out what Professor Walsh was doing down there in that room.”

Riley’s mouth set in a thin, uncompromising line, and he held his hands before him, folded into fists as if he really, really wished he was still gripping his gun. Probably it would have given him some feeling of authority. “This area is under military jurisdiction…”

“Wrong,” she informed the ex-TA dangerously. “This area is under  _ my _ jurisdiction. I’m the Slayer. She who fights the forces of darkness, and scares all the little monsters to sleep. I’ve been around since the beginning of time. Since before recorded history. You’re just a blip on the radar. And what you’re doing is wrong. Now get.  _ Out _ .”

He stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. “If you’re what scares all the little monsters to sleep, then you’re just a fairytale. A boogeyman. A…”

“Huh. I feel pretty real to me.”

Spike grinned and pulled a cigarette out of the pack to hold it loosely between two fingers. “She’s a helluva lot scarier than any boogeyman, Soldier Boy. She could take down every one of you lot." Snugged the smoke between his lips. "You’re just boys with guns. She’s the supernatural sheriff. I’d say back down while you still got your balls intact.” And flipping open his Zippo, he lit up.  


/I love you./ “You heard him. This is _my_ town.  _ Leave _ .”

Riley looked stunned at her summary dismissal. “But… It’s not that easy! There’s red tape, and protocols, and… Are you protecting these inhuman  _ monsters?” _

“Oh, some of ‘em aren’t so bad once you get to know ‘em.” Buffy smiled sunnily at the vampire currently lowering his freshly-lit cigarette to smirk at his former tormentors, smoke drifting from flared nostrils. Her smile faded a little as she scuffed at the thick blood trickling around the stones in the asphalt, out of the body of the nearby Hellion. “Some of ‘em are.” She lifted hard eyes to meet first Riley’s, then Forrest’s burning, hateful ones, then Graham’s thoughtful gaze. “And none of them deserve to be cut open while they’re alive, like you’re doing; like a frog on a table in a seventh-grade anatomy class.  _ No _ one deserves that.” Back to Riley. “It makes me wonder who the real monsters are, that you can convince yourself that’s actually okay. I mean, I kill them if they hurt anyone, sure, but that’s cold hard math. Toe-to-toe, throw down and done. None of this torture crap. You guys are sadistic.” A grunt of agreement from Spike as he resumed smoking in silence.

“We’re… learning… about a world we had no idea existed before…” Riley’s shock at her attitude was palpable. “And anyway, I don’t ask questions! I just execute my orders…”

“Well, now you have new orders. Get the hell off my hellmouth. Leave. Pronto.”

The idea that she might not want his assistance seemed beyond Riley's comprehension. “Buffy, you’re not making any sense! We could help you clean up the place! Have you  _ seen _ this town? It’s a disaster area! There are human casualties! There are… HST  _ bikers _ trying to take over; smashing everything! They’d call the National Guard in anyway; and you’re saying this is  _ okay?” _

Buffy smiled a little at Spike and caught his free hand. Squeezed it, felt him squeeze back, knew it meant that whether he cared all that much about Sunnydale, he cared that she cared, and he would help her set things to rights. He’d help with the demon side of town, help Willy, help her after dark with the parts she asked of him on her side. Because he was hers. 

She noted, as she tore her eyes away from him, Riley staring at her, and shrugged, not to make a big thing of it. “Just another Tuesday night on the Hellmouth, right Spike?”

He pulled his cigarette briefly away from his mouth. “Yeah, you know. We’ll knock the place back together eventually. Everyone hereabouts will either move or conveniently get amnesia, ‘cept when it comes time to file for their insurance payouts. By next week it’ll be business as usual.”

Riley’s eyes seemed riveted on their joined hands. “Buffy, I thought we had something. I thought you were a nice girl. Are you… with a  _ vampire?” _

/Sherlock, you are not./ With a nonchalant shrug she didn’t feel, Buffy shot back. “I thought you were a nice guy, not a sadistic commando who likes torturing living things for science. So I think we’re even.” Toughening up her voice, she tugged Spike into a tight turn. “I’ll leave it up to you to decide who’s a worse monster on your own time,” she called over her shoulder, and yanked her guy back toward their ride. “In the meantime, I think your shop has been shut down here. Hopefully the government will decide it’s a loss. C’mon, Spike. Mom’s probably got dinner waiting for us, if I know her.” She could feel the soldiers’ eyes on their backs as they headed for the DeSoto, but didn’t turn or acknowledge them in the slightest. 

As if putting on a show, Spike held her door for her before tamping out his cigarette and sauntering around to the driver’s side to put the car in gear. And then he drove right at the trio of wounded men, forcing them to limp numbly out of the way and scatter all over the street like a covey of startled pheasants as he blew past them to make his turn onto Heatherly. “You’re a dope,” Buffy informed him with certainty, and laid her hand on his knee, because she didn’t at all blame him for wanting to get some of his own back against the jerks.

He didn’t answer, but he did chuckle almost all the way back to Revello.

***

“…And then it turned out that there were all these soldiers based under basically the entire northeast side of the campus…”

“Are you serious?”

“It gets even worse. They were doing these horrible experiments on all the demons in town; torturing them, cutting them open while they were still awake. Spike never mentioned it, but when they put the chip in his head, he woke up at one point and they just… kept on cutting…”

Spike winced beside her, eyes on his plate.

“Oh my God, Spike! How awful! And these men, they’re…”

Buffy looked away from her mother, prodded at her salad. “They’re mostly dead, I think, or on the run. The demons got out of their cells…” No need to tell Mom exactly how that happened, probably. “In all the confusion, some of them got out and so did we. We stopped a few of the soldiers from chasing down the survivors.” She felt her lips tighten. “One of the soldiers was, um, that cute TA I told you about? Riley Finn?”

“Oh my God!”

Buffy bit her lip. “It gets better. The head of the whole thing was my Psych professor.”

Mom sat back in her seat to stare at her, meatloaf forgotten. “The professor you really liked? The one from the class where you said you felt you were learning the most out of any subject?”

Buffy forced a small laugh. “Isn’t that me all over? Go figure, huh?” It still kind of hurt that she had lost that teacher, that course. /Yay, hellmouth living. And what happens now? Do Wil and I lose those credits? Do we have to retake the class? Because it’ll be so _boring_ with someone else. Or will someone else step in? Because we were just about to do finals, and now we don’t have a professor _or_ a TA./ Putting up with a stand-in would be hella dull, but at least it wouldn’t be a repeat. /And it’s not like it’s  _ our _ fault that our teacher turned out to be a psycho Frankenstein mad scientist chick!/ 

She sighed heavily, and felt Spike’s hand slide over hers on the table. “Know it doesn’t help with the enthusiasm for the subject, but when it comes to the bureaucracy bit, I reckon it’ll be alright, pet. I’m sure they’ll either hold your credits or find some other poor soul tryin’ for their teaching degree or for tenure or some such who’ll be willing to take on the class and overwork themselves to be sure you lot get to finish. You’ve just the last week or so and exams left, right? Or a final essay or some such?” At her blink of surprise, he nodded firmly. “Not a lot left to mark, then. No doubt any sod with half a brain can shepherd you through with the text and some notes from the mad bint’s office. Might not be the same, but at least you won’t be out the hours.”

Buffy threw him a grateful, if slightly suspicious look. “You so went to college, didn’t you?” she half-prodded, half-teased.

He shut up like a clam.

/Bingo./ The question was, when? Before… like way back in the day, or sometime since then, because he was bored and was taking a hiatus from snacking on the little Happy Meals with legs to broaden his mind or something?

Somehow Buffy kind of had a hard time picturing a Master vampire putting up with tests and essays and stuff, especially one as impatient and impulsive as Spike… but at the same time, she was kind of picking up that he had a carefully-hidden thing for knowledge buried in there somewhere. He sure quoted a lot of stuff. He also tended to be patient when it came to things he really wanted, and obviously he could restrain his killer instincts when it paid for him to do so. And who knew how bored he had gotten over the centuries, right? Maybe at some point Miss NutsnCrazy had irritated him or gone AWOL with Angel or something and he’d gone and drowned his sorrows in college. “Did you, like, study, I dunno…” She frowned. “You can talk Art with Mom. And you got all interested in my Composition class…”

Mom perked up. “Spike, when did you…”

Spike very abruptly pushed himself to his feet. “Appreciate the meal, Mum. Meatloaf was lovely. Compliments to the chef. Think I hear the Watcher on the stoop, though. Should go and let him in, yeah?” 

Buffy found herself abruptly deserted. She wasn’t sure when she had ever seen her vampire move so fast; and that included during actual fights. “You know he’s gonna wanna know too,” she called after his retreating back. Spike’s shoulders hunched as continued to the door.

Buffy turned back to her mother and whispered conspiratorially (and, incidentally, loud enough for her guy to hear), “I think if I ever wanna know, I’m gonna have to pull out the big guns and, like, seduce it out of him.” /And woah, did I just say that to my  _ mother? _ / Moving hurriedly, Buffy grabbed her glass and took a quick sip of her juice, burying her face in the rim to avoid looking at Mom. Her brain had obviously been fried by the car-sex-thing.

When she risked a glance at her table companion, though, Mom’s eyes were twinkling. “Not that I officially condone this conversation, but unofficially… you can probably get just about anything out of a guy with a little encouragement in that department. And you really need to let me know once you have the answer, because I have to admit, Buffy, now I’m just burning with curiosity.” Her eyes fled to the entryway, where Spike had the door open and was ushering a reluctant Giles through into the house with a few stiff pleasantries. 

“Watcher’s come to do a bit of a debrief,” Spike muttered by way of introduction as he reentered the dining room and resumed his seat to Buffy’s left. 

Giles paused briefly behind him in the doorway, taking in what was obviously a family-style dinner, Spike being fully included in the festivities. “Ah, I didn’t mean to intrude,” he murmured, clearly somewhat taken aback. 

“It’s alright, Giles,” Buffy answered brightly, and gestured with her fork. “You probably didn’t expect us to be eating dinner this late, but you know… We just got back, so.” She glanced over at Mom. “There’s enough, right?”

“Oh, of course, if you want to join us, Rupert…”

“Oh, no, that won’t be necessary, Joyce, thank you. I only came to speak to Buffy very briefly, and then I shall head back to my flat…”

Spike exhaled in disgust and leaned back away from his plate. “Best if you just come out with it, old man. Know you have concerns. Go ahead and air them in front of everyone and have done with it. And any road, if a lady like Joyce has invited you to sup with us, you might as well have the stones to have a seat, since you’re about to read her daughter the riot act while she’s trying to stomach her meal.” His mouth twitched a little in something between disdain and approval. “Though, give credit where it’s due, least you have the decency to wait till it’s not a public venue, unlike Harris.”

Giles sighed and, moving closer, tugged out a chair and sat slowly across from Buffy, who was feeling abruptly a great deal less hungry than she had been about one second ago. God, Spike was perceptive. She had thought Giles had just been here to get the scoop on whatever they might have seen on the way home, or to discuss what went down at the soldier complex; but judging from the way he was acting, her vamp was right on the money. “Yes, well,” he muttered as he settled himself more firmly in his seat. “Xander does tend to be a bit crass and overprotective, if his heart is in the right place." He glanced over, saw a plate descending to his level, and blinked in surprise. “Oh. Ta ever so, Joyce.” 

“Juice, milk, or coffee?” Her lips twitched slightly, though her eyes were just this side of flinty. “I’m afraid I don’t have any tea.”

“Oh. I, ah… It’s a bit late for me. Ah, milk, I suppose?”

With a nod, Mom vanished briefly back into the kitchen. 

Silence fell over the table. 

“Meatloaf’s like to get cold, pet,” Spike informed Buffy softly. 

“Not hungry anymore.”

“I know love. Got to keep you fed up though. Got a whole bloody town to put back to rights tomorrow.”

With a sigh, Buffy lowered her forehead to her hand beside her plate. “Go ahead and lay it on me, Giles. Just get it over with, okay?” He had been acting almost understanding back there by the doorway to the underground complex; withholding judgment, watching her with measured eyes, and eventually cutting Xander off. She should’ve realized it had been too easy; that it had just been his offense at Xander’s impolitic words that had led him to react the way he had. That inborn British reserve of his hated rudeness, and he tended to cut off some of the choicer phrases and meaner catfights amongst the Scoobies when they got out of hand, but that didn’t mean he was the same Giles now as he had been back when she had first slept with Angel and he had been so warm, so open and understanding and willing to listen. She would never forget him telling her that the Angelus thing wasn’t her fault. That Angel had proven more than once that he loved her, that there was no way she could’ve known what would’ve happened, and that he wouldn’t hit her with a bunch of guilt. That all she’d get from him was support and respect. 

But that had been before Jenny Calendar. Before his torture. Before… all of it. Now…

Who knew. Because she would also never forget how much it had hurt, that look in his eyes after he’d found out she’d been hiding Angel at the mansion last year. She was beyond terrified that if she looked up she would see that expression again; pained, stern, and unforgiving. Impossible to forget how he had shut her down with a fierce,  _ “Be quiet.” _ Giles had never spoken to her like that before or since, and it had crushed her soul. His whole speech about how she had to put the fate of the world first—as if she hadn’t already, and nearly destroyed herself in the process, by putting that sword through Angel’s heart, and what did he  _ want _ from her?—that had been bad enough. But the defeat and the disappointment in his voice when he’d said,  _ “What would be the point?” _ had been beyond agonizing, beyond crushing; the realization that he had felt like she didn’t  _ care _ . That he’d thought she was just a stupid kid who acted on impulse and didn’t have well-thought-out reasons for her decisions. It still haunted her, knowing that he wasn’t ready to listen to those reasons, then or now. He had already once assumed her choices were all about childish infatuation or lust. Why wouldn’t he assume the same thing this time?

And therein lay the problem. Giles had accused her of having no respect for him, but in essence he had long since stopped respecting  _ her _ . He had gone on about how she was risking everyone’s lives by ‘harboring a known murderer’; and yes, she knew that Angelus had tortured him for fun. Angelus, not Angel, no matter what he’d said. The unfairness of that slip still rankled. But to go from that to telling her that because she hadn’t informed them of Angel’s reappearance meant she had no respect for him or his job was beyond unfair. Of  _ course _ she hadn’t told them. His reaction had only proved she couldn’t have done so. His, Xander’s, even Willow’s. 

They would have judged Angel for what he’d done as Angelus.

The ‘respect’ part was the part that killed her, still, because whatever Giles might have said after everything had first gone down, he had never respected her or completely supported her since then when it came to her and vampires and her and her love life, and realizing it really rankled. More than that, it hurt… and she could only just now recognize that it also made her more than a little angry. Because yes, it remained incredibly painful to think he was disappointed in her, that he felt she had let him down again. /But… you’re kind of letting me down too/ she realized very suddenly. /Because this  _ isn’t _ the same./ 

It was a revelation, and one she badly needed if she were to survive this discussion. Because this was  _ Giles _ . She accepted his authority over her in a way that she did no one else; yearned for it. Fighting with Xander about her love life was one thing. She badly wanted to keep the peace among her friends, obviously; desperately needed them all at her side if she were to make it through the wilds of her life… but the thing was, Xander would eventually forgive her. If he had forgiven her about Angel, if he could forgive her  _ both _ times… /Well, probably that has a lot to do with the fact that he never actually got directly hurt, unlike Giles, who totally did. Which, to be real, kind of begs the question of why Xan’s so adamant about the whole thing, and huh./ Maybe, it occurred to her belatedly, in his own way, if only by some kind of cumulative effect that honestly had little to do with Angelus per se, Xander was as screwed up and traumatized about vampires as she herself was. 

But, well, the fact remained that if Xander could forgive her about having dated Angel, slept with him, brought out Angelus, and then hidden the resurgent Angel and dated him again thereafter, then he should be able to forgive her for dating another vampire who, he would eventually learn, was so not going to hurt any of them. After all, Willow seemed willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, and to extend the same to Spike, despite the fact that she  _ had _ experienced direct stalk-age from Angelus. /Well, and from Spike too, to be fair./ 

Heck, if she was being completely fair, Buffy supposed that Spike had possibly been directly scarier toward Xander than Angelus had ever been, which might make it a little harder to get him to make with the acceptance this time around even than he had been about the whole ‘Angel’s back and I’m sort of not-dating him again’. Between Xan and the direct Spike-hate, and Giles’ all-around vamp-distrust, both well-earned, she supposed it might be a tossup at this point who would give her more grief this time around. 

Though… if Xander kept up the insults, someday Spike might do direct damage again and confirm all his fears, if only to smack him upside the head. /Which you’ll be able to do if I have my way./

Not the best plan right now to tell Giles, of course, that she was starting to seriously consider something that none of them, especially her Watcher, were really gonna like. Which was so not gonna make this any better, but… Well. That was a story for another day. Because first she had to deal with the fact that Giles, unlike Xander, might never forgive her for what had gone down with a whole other vampire, a year and a half ago, and that thought quite honestly terrified her.

She was really going to have to have faith that she  _ deserved _ his forgiveness, deserved this second chance if she was going to make it through this conversation. More than that, she was going to have to rack up enough righteous indignation to  _ believe _ it, if she was going to face down even this first level of disappointment. Definitely before she gave him a whole other one to get through. /Because there  _ will _ be more./

Mom came back, set Giles’ glass of milk before him, and still Giles hadn’t opened with anything. Maybe he felt a little surrounded, outnumbered, with both Mom and Spike there ready to defend her. Buffy was grateful for that, of course, but still, the thought of not having her father figure at her back was painful as she pushed on. She had to fight for this, make him  _ see _ . /Which means… I better open before he can knock me back, make me small./ “Giles, Spike is not Angelus. He’s never tortured you. He’s never gone out of his way to try to kill any of you. He’s always quit before that happened...”

“Oi! Way to make me feel like a shite Big Bad, Buffy!” 

Buffy ignored his protests. “Heck; he could’ve knocked me off that first night, but he just studied me and threw shade. He could’ve done it on Parent-Teacher night, but after Mom whammied him with that fire-axe…”

“Wasn’t about to do in a girl with her mum lookin’ on, was I?” Spike put in cheerfully, and popped a shred of meatloaf into his mouth. “Got too much respect for mums to do that, an’ Joyce was a right angry bear that night. Gave me the hell of a turn. Didn’t expect a mother in the mix.”

/Oh./ That was one mystery solved. Knowing what Spike felt about mothers, it actually kind of made a lot of sense. /And you know what? In a way it means this is all… kinda your fault, Mom, since you made him hold up long enough to really  _ see _ me… so I guess…/ “Thanks, Mom, for making him stop and reconsider.”

“No charge,” Mom answered, lifting her glass. She had a funny little smile dancing around her lips as she said it. “Though I’d like to hear that it didn’t start some kind of one-sided love-affair. Because if there’s one story I’m tired of hearing, it’s a vampire sniffing around my teenage…”

“I swear to you, Joyce, that’s Angel’s gig.” And wow, Spike sounded harried. “All I wanted to do was fight her. Recognized a worthy adversary, was all. I was with Dru. Didn’t think of her that way at all till later; you have my word. Didn’t even recognize it myself till recently! Admired her, yeah, but…”

Mom smiled and leaned back in her seat. “At ease, young man. But glad to hear it.”

Giles spluttered. “Did you just call a centuries-old vampire ‘young man’?”

Spike ignored the Watcher’s incredulous tones to relax slightly. Buffy did her best not to giggle at his clear, if abating, horror. “Don’t make him feel bad about his advanced age, Giles. He’s totally not decrepit, I swear…”

“Not centuries old, either,” Spike put in sourly. “Hell. I’m only a hundred nineteen, this time about anyway.”

/Oh. Well, the Council bio on you was so way wrong./

Mom leaned forward, chin in her hand and a slight look of concern on her face. “How old were you when you were…” She waved her hand vaguely around in the air. “You know.”

He sighed slightly and did not quite glance at Buffy. “Not quite twenty-seven, Mum.” His hand, amazingly, trembled in Buffy’s grasp, as if he were more afraid that Mom would summarily dismiss him as a suitor for his various ages than he was of any of Giles’ pronouncements.

Buffy squeezed his hand reassuringly. “Such an old man,” she teased. “Heck, in my record-book you’re like the youngest guy I’ve ever dated who’s already died.”

Spike shot her a burning look and rolled his eyes for her levity.

“Anyway,” Buffy pushed on, turning away from her worried vamp, “as I was saying, if you go oh-for… what, Spike? I’m not sure if I can even count how many times you spectacularly failed to off me…”

“Oi!”

“I’m just saying, I think I see a pattern developing.”

Honestly, she wasn’t sure his ire was entirely put on. “That was supposed to bloody well remain between us, you maddening chit, and you know it!”

“Okay, but it if helps us now…” She gave him a nudge with her shoulder, rocking him away from her a little. He subsided, glowering in the general direction of his untouched rabbit-food.

Giles looked flummoxed. “But… Oh, this is nonsense! You do know it’s utterly preposterous, whatever he’s told you. You  _ must _ , Buffy! He went after you any number of times after that. And then there was the business of the Order of Taraka…”

Spike held up one finger to signal a halt to the conversation and reached out to pick up his glass. Sipped from it briefly as if he badly needed a drink of anything to regain his equanimity. Set it aside finally, and cleared his throat. “By that point I’d talked a bloody big game about doin’ the Slayer. Couldn’t rightly back down, could I? Dru was back there behind me all the time, goin’ on about, ‘Why can’t you kill her for me, Spike? Why can’t you do it?’ Like to drive me right off my nut.” A strange, contemplative look crossed his face briefly. “Trouble was, I had no clue why I couldn’t, yet. All I knew was, couldn’t see myself clear to do the deed m’self anymore, for all I thought I needed her blood to heal Dru. So I aimed instead for my sod of a grandsire in the hopes his blood would do as well, and hired out.” His eyes sought Buffy’s startled ones and he shrugged. “Not my finest moment, but it seemed to make sense at the time.”

Buffy got it, felt her mouth go round in a soundless ‘O’. And all the sudden all of her rage at him for going after Angel faded a little in retrospect, because if Spike had altered his focus to Angel to heal Drusilla… Well, it was clear there was a lot of bad blood between those two going back a long time. Honestly, she probably didn’t want to know about most of it, but it definitely altered her perceptions about the whole ‘attacked and tortured my then-boyfriend’ thing if it was all a subconscious way to avoid using  _ her _ blood to save his then-girlfriend. 

That was just…

To be real, Buffy wasn’t even sure how to deal with this information at this stage of the game. 

“What are…” Mom began, confused. “What’s an order of trak…”

“That’s rubbish, Spike,” Giles interrupted fiercely. “You don’t hire a hit-squad if you don’t mean it!”

Spike never took his eyes from Buffy’s, and there was a request for forgiveness buried deeply there. “Oh, come now, man. I’m the bloody slayer of Slayers. In what sodding universe would I give my prize to some other tosser, if I’d meant it for my own?” He shook his head once, a short, sharp jerk of negation. “Didn’t want it anymore; deep inside hoped like hell the girl would beat ‘em all and win out.” A slow smile touched his grim countenance, lit up his eyes to bathe Buffy in the glow of his pride in her accomplishments. “And she did, didn’t she. Like always. Still in the world, there for me to fight her.” His fingers twitched in hers; snaked out, intertwined. She joined him in it, folded them close, found the connection. Held. “All I wanted. Her still there in it, so I could try myself again.” God, the way his eyes shone on hers. “Didn’t need to do her in. Just wanted the fight, not the prize.”

Buffy felt warm from head to toe, covered their joined hands with her free one. “I get it.”

“But… But…” Giles sounded like he’d been hit over the head with a cement truck.

Spike dragged his gaze away finally, still smiling a little. “Didn’t even drain the last one. She deserved the respect of knowin’ she didn’t go out that way. She was a bit like our girl, that one. Had style. Did the first one that way, a’ course. She was a Council tool; totally by the book. Buffy…” He shook his head, slow and sure. “It was never about blood, or I'd've gone after someone weaker'n me. It was always about the contest; and we can have that without it ending.” His voice dropped to a rough, hungry whisper. “Never-ending.” 

She couldn’t look away if she tried. “Yes.” / _ Please _ ./

“It’s about knowing… you’ve found the  _ One _ .”

“Yes.” / _ God _ , yes./

“What in the name of… Joyce, are you going to allow this...”

/Oh, crap./ Dragged away from Spike’s eyes, Buffy realized belatedly how all this might sound to her mother, shot her a fearful glance. And was startled by what she saw there. 

Mom looked… thoughtful. “Spike’s told me about his past. And what I’m hearing here is that he doesn’t want anything to happen to my daughter, because he’s found his match. He wants her alive, to challenge him.” Her gaze flickered away to Giles’, came back to theirs. “Which to be honest, is all any of us ever want, if this sounds… a bit more primitive.” Her eyes met Buffy’s, an odd, measuring expression written on her face. “I think my daughter feels the same, or I’m assuming she would have killed Spike a long time ago.”

Amazed at her mother’s insight, Buffy held the moment for a breath before turning inexorably away to meet her vampire’s glowing eyes. And she nodded. “Yes.” 

His breath caught. “Never-ending,” he whispered once more. “Maybe someday again.”

“Yes.” She heard herself breathe it without thinking. 

Amazement touched his eyes. His hand trembled again in hers, and he completely  _ stopped _ breathing. 

“I don’t understand. What are you…”

/Definitely a conversation for a later time./ But Buffy knew Spike got it, what she was saying. What she intended, if she could ever make it happen… and she could not have looked away from the shine in his eyes for any money. No way in hell. He looked like he could go up in flames right now, just looking at her. “Giles,” she managed without remotely acknowledging her Watcher otherwise, “up until it went bad, you were fine with me loving Angel, because you knew I only had a few years, if that. You just wanted me to be happy. Ever since I beat the odds a few times we’ve been all acting like I get to have a normal life, get to date normal guys… But that’s really not fair; to me or to them, because we all know I don’t. I have the life-expectancy of, like, a butterfly or something…”

“Buffy, please…” Mom breathed, and Buffy felt a brief qualm of guilt for saying it so blatantly in front of her mother… but it was true, dammit. 

Spike’s eyes on hers, blazing now. “Won’t let it happen, pet. If I have to throw myself in front of you, dust for you…”

She lifted her hand to cup his cheek, still unable to look away. /It’s not a tit-for-tat, Spike. And I wasn’t asking for that when I…/ But she got it, why he would do it. Knew he would do it anyway; either way. “I know. But they have to understand.”

He nodded, flipped his hand over to clutch hers hard as she went on. “What happens to this so-called normal guy,” she demanded of Giles, still without looking at him, “when I die in a fight one of these days? I need some who can help keep me alive; who understands. And shouldn’t I get to have something like happiness for as long as I can squeeze any out of life before I go?”

“Buffy…” Giles sounded as choked, as agonized as Mom had. 

She pushed on, not letting up. “Don’t I  _ deserve _ that, for everything else I have to give up?

“Buffy, of course you do, but…”

She couldn’t let him take back over, dragged her eyes from Spike’s to turn her gaze on her Watcher, hard and uncompromising. “I need an equal. And Spike’s it.” He lifted her hand, still cupped in his, to his lips, and she closed her eyes involuntarily at the feel of his mouth brushing her knuckles, the shivers cascading down her spine from neck to nipples to clit to core and back up again. / _ God _ , he’s it./ 

/Where was I?/ “And, um… He’s helped us. Obviously. Which isn’t just about the chip, because he helped  _ you _ ,” she reminded Giles, and okay, so her voice was a little hoarse all the sudden, and they could just deal. And Spike needed to stop smirking all knowingly over there, the jerk. 

“Be that as it may, Buffy, as the only example of a time when he’s assisted us sans the chip, as an unsouled vampire, that event was no doubt all to help himself and his then-paramour.”

/Thank you so much for bringing up Drusilla while he’s making me feel  _ these _ feels./ “Which proves right there that demons can love,” Buffy pointed out. /And that was the hardest part for me. It was only Angelus who couldn’t, not all demons. I just hit the ugh-jackpot with the one riding the guy I dated the first time around. Because if he couldn’t, was it because of me?/

Spike’s eyes on hers, glowing. /It’s not me. Not if  _ you _ can really love. Angelus had the problem, not me./ It was such a relief, finally, to know it in her bones. “Don’t tell me they need a soul to love. I’ve seen the evidence to the contrary. And anyway, we all know the no-soul line is garbage.”

“Buffy!” her Watcher sputtered, stunned.

“The demon  _ what _ , Giles?” she countered fiercely. “Tell me that much.”

“Beg pardon?” he spluttered.

Mom was watching them with interest, not interrupting; like watching a volleyball match. Spike had leaned forward avidly, a faint grin playing over his lips and occasionally curling his tongue. His eyes on Buffy gleamed like he was watching his horse come in ahead in some race. The dope. “Did you ever question, the demon's  _ what?” _ At Giles’ blank look she forged on in frustration. “What does the demon contribute when it comes to this dimension? A vampire has a human body, human memories, a sort of mixture of the human and demon hearts if Spike’s anything to go on, but that’s, you know, metaphorical…”

Spike made a huffing noise that sounded darkly amused.

“I… I don’t quite… ‘The last demon to leave this reality fed off a human, mixed their blood…’” Giles quoted by rote, as if he were lifting a shield against an unexpected assault.

“No, I don’t think so. If it was just their blood being mixed, just biological, then vamps wouldn't work the way they do. I’m just saying. So what is it? We’ve got the body figured out, the memories, the heart if you will.” She leaned across the table to pin her Watcher with a glare. “But they’re not really what you taught me, are they, Giles? Not empty, or they wouldn’t have all that heart, wouldn’t be able to love.” Backing away, she caught Spike’s hand once more. “Maybe not the same way as we do, but they do. I think your books are just obsessed with the  _ human _ soul. But you yourself were the one to say they have a demon one before you completely took it back and let me believe it; probably to help me deal with the Angelus thing. But I’m over that now, so tell me. How can we keep using the word ‘soulless’ about all these demons, when all we really mean is that they just don’t have a human one?” And it really hit her, right then, with the full force of epiphany. “Because why  _ should  _ they, when they’re not human?”

Giles looked away from Spike’s triumphant glare. “It’s a matter of semantics. One cannot trust the actions of a non-human soul…”

Buffy scoffed. “You can’t trust a lot of souled humans. Look at Ford. Heck; look at Xander. He still had his soul when he was possessed, and look what he tried to do to me…” 

Spike growled low in his throat. Giles flinched, making it clear that he’d known about the rape attempt, which, nice. Dammit. 

“Wait, what did Xander try to do to you? And what happened with Ford?”

/Oh, damn./ Buffy turned to her mother, hoping to drive wide around the Xander question. “Um… Ford had brain tumors, so he tried to trade me to the local vamp-camp in exchange for being sired so he wouldn’t die…”

“No need to sugar-coat it, pet. He was selling the Slayer to  _ me _ , Joyce.”  
  
"He _what?"_ An incredulous glare, pinned right on Spike.

Buffy knew exactly what her guy was doing, the smooth and dangerous game he was playing on her behalf. A distraction, turning Mom’s attention on him to avoid her returning to the question of Xander. And that was for sure for her sake, not for Xander’s. A big risk, considering how new was his endorsement in the Mom-realm. 

Also, ugh. There were so many things, so much history her mother didn’t know about in their many skirmishes. Any one of those past moments, revealed, could tip the scales away from acceptance to a negative impression.

“‘Cept, I wouldn’t’ve sired that little pissant if he paid me,” Spike went on flatly. “Not a turncoat ready to play Judas on a friend, screw to over someone like this one to save his own worthless arse. And any road, Buffy turned it all around; saved the whole lot of vampire wannabes without blinking, by threatening Dru…” 

“Because I knew even if I didn’t want to admit it, that vampires can love.”

“Which begs the wildly-reckless question,” Giles broke in, clearly willing to join her in running right the hell past anything Xander-related, “if Spike now has… romantic interest in you, then…”  
  
Spike snorted, fervent and dismissive all in one. “Then I’ll move the world for her.”

Buffy nodded, forcing her eyes open. “You weren’t there, Giles, when we raided that idiotic vampire-lovers’ club, so you didn’t see, but he gave up _everything_ then for Drusilla. For love. He did it again with the Acathla thing; gave up his reputation, his place in the demon world. All of it, for love. I think we can count on him to do it again, now.”

Giles half rose to his feet. “Oh, but this is preposterous. Buffy, you must realize that he has to be pretending. All this ‘being good’ for you. It’s sucking up! There has to be some sort of angle! He’s a bloody  _ vampire!  _ He’s no notion or need of doing the right thing, wouldn’t know it if it hit him across the face! His proposing working with the Slayer, loving her, makes as much sense as… As…”

Spike interrupted with one of his characteristic, sardonic chuckles. “There’s really no comparison, Rupert, so might as well give it up. And you’re right. I can’t tell what’s right by your lights. I’ve got to rely on the Slayer for that. And I’ll cock it up, more’n once, since I’m only doin’ it to be with her…”

Giles whirled on Spike before Buffy could get a word in edgewise. “And don’t you realize what that’ll do to her? Don’t you think she has enough to be going on with without being a… a vampire’s conscience? And what if she has to stake you, if you’re her lover? Have you thought of that, you gormless tit? She’s already had to kill a vampire she loved, and it damn near destroyed her…”

“Giles! This is  _ my  _ decision…” Buffy was shaking, all of her hidden terrors striking her to the core at this bald statement. Her greatest fear.

Giles swung back to face her, knuckles planted on the table and face florid with terror and grief; all for her, she realized. This was all based out of love, and fear for her, and she needed to remember that. “I can’t… Buffy,  _ please!  _ You can't trust it; can't trust your _heart_ to this, when _that's_ the likely end result!  Don’t you think it’s all a bit pat? Him acting this way? I don’t know what his ulterior motive is, but there has to be one! William the Bloody, acting the lapdog…”

“Oi!”

“Heeling to the Slayer like some sort of loyal lieutenant, ready to do her bidding against the demon world so long as he gets to do a bit of violence, but only the violence  _ she _ proposes? And then, what? He disposes, in her name? It’s bloody well unnatural, is what it is!"  
  
"You're bleedin' right it is, but there it is just the same, innit? Love the chit an' that's all of it, Rupert."  
  
Buffy watched her Watcher's stymied expressions. "Am I not worth it?" She felt very small as she asked it.  
  
He faltered, and his face twisted. "Oh, Buffy, loving you is an exceedingly worthy goal. It's merely that the idea that it’s enough to change the nature of a century-old Master vampire steeped in blood is…”

“I think he’s being very careful,” Buffy interjected softly, and folded her hand over Spike’s. She ignored Spike’s startled look to keep her eye on her Watcher. “I think this is kind of a honeymoon period, while we find our way around all the sharp, pointy edges of this relationship. And there will be tough spots, and rough spots, and spots where we’ll both feel like giving up, or like it’s impossible, because, yeah. It’s insane. But if you wanna know why Spike’s being so careful right now… it’s for the same reason I am.” Spike jerked under her hand. She gave it a squeeze. “It’s because he’s afraid I’ll throw him away if he screws up. Which I won’t, but, you know. We both have our insecurities. Even when something’s so wrong it’s right.”

Giles slid back down into his seat, mouth open like a fish out of water. “Buffy…”

“No,” She rode right over him. /I’m the Slayer. You’re my Watcher, but I’m the Slayer, dammit. And… someday if you love me, if you actually want me to be happy and safe and even free a little, you’ll accept that Spike gives me all that./ “This _ stays, _ Giles.”

“Buffy…”

“I’ve held him,” she told her father-figure firmly, and her eyes drifted inexorably back to meet Spike’s. “I’ve fed him. I’ve kept him safe. He’s  _ mine _ .” /End of discussion./

Spike gave an odd jolt in her hands, and a shudder ran through his entire body. And then he was glowing at her again, like some picture of a sun-warmed lake in Switzerland under a perfect sky. She could travel the world in those eyes and always be home. 

“Good Lord! You’ve fed…” Half-leaping across the table, Giles reached out with one hand to try to get an angle on her neck; to inspect her for damage. 

Spike gave a little, low growl, though he didn’t speak. Buffy sighed and tore herself away to meet her Watcher’s distressed gaze, flicked her eyes to Mom’s, surveying the conversation with fascinated interest. “Not like that.” Was Giles being dumb? Like, on purpose? “Obviously it wouldn’t work like that for him right now. But I have. I did. And he’s  _ mine _ now.” It probably bore repeating, till they all got it through their heads.

Spike’s hand was now firm and steady in hers, certain as life. An acknowledgment that he was, indeed, hers. It was all she needed.

Giles subsided back to his seat, and now he was the one visibly trembling. “Joyce, did you know about…”

“They did it in my kitchen, right in front of my eyes. They used one of my paring knives.”

“Good Lord.” Her Watcher’s voice was now quaking. “Buffy, what on Earth could possibly have possessed you to…” He halted, shrewd gaze going from one to the other of them. “I understand that he was badly injured during the Hellions’ first assault, but to… To go down that road again with a vampire, chipped or no…”

Buffy shook her head, smiled slightly at Spike. “Somehow I think if things were different, I’d still be fine this time around.”

Something thrummed through Spike; something bright and fierce and incredibly intense. “Pet…” he whispered.

_ “Mine,” _ she repeated, and he closed his eyes, another shiver running through him. And Buffy had the feeling that something very profound had just happened. Something serious, something she only understood at a level that started beneath the skin and at the back of her mind and maybe down deep where that other part of her lived. The untamed part, the one that came out after dark and fought at his side, and had no words but only images, and the poetry of battle and the hunt, and the fire of his touch and of and being eternally at his side. 

“Granted, with the chip, that’s all well and good,” Giles croaked from somewhere far away, “but you must understand…”

“Actually,” Buffy whispered, because why not just put it all out there, “I think I’m gonna grab a doctor when the military comes back to clean up their mess, and have that thing taken out.”

Spike shook harder in her hands as her words confirmed aloud what her eyes had already promised.

“Buffy…” Giles whispered, aghast.

“It’s too dangerous. They could control him. We have no idea what they were planning to use it for, what they might still use it for. How they could use it against us, use Spike against his will against us, like a mole in our group. Especially now they know we know about them and they have reason to think of us as enemies…”

Spike resurrected the low snarl to show exactly what he thought of being so employed against her. She stroked the back of his hand soothingly as she went on. “And anyway, when it comes to us, the chip doesn’t matter. It didn’t before and it won’t again…”

“Buffy, are you honestly sitting here telling me that…”

Buffy swung hard away from her vampire to glare at her Watcher, severe and uncompromising. “You don’t  _ get _ it. He’s  _ mine _ , Giles. He’s given himself to me. You have no idea, because you don’t understand how it works, but… He’s always been the one to take care of someone else. I took care of him while he was broken. He’s mine now, and he’ll never purposely do anything to hurt me.  _ Ever _ .” /Well, not outside of maybe a little sparring, but he won’t ever hurt me  _ that  _ way. He won’t ever hurt my heart. We can damage each other with stupid words, but we’ll be okay. We can fight. We can be idiots about things, but he won’t ever leave, and he won’t ever… break me./ It was completely the opposite of what she had had with the other vampire she had dated, and that was… That kind of safety, the safety not of the body but of the heart, was a new and giddy certainty that thrilled. 

She could take a certain level of danger when it came to the physical; in fact craved it. She had not had that violent teeter-totter of unleashed desperation before, that willingness to let it all go, and see where it led, while still knowing… her heart was safe. This… This was the literal flip-side of what she had had with Angel, here, and  _ god _ , she needed it, wanted it. Had never known till this moment how badly.

The sound Spike was making had morphed to something remarkably like a purr. It tolled through her being, rumbled through every cell of her body, making her jumpy, making her want to climb up on him and… And it was so not the venue right now, but, /Oh God, please,  _ soon _ ./

“That was… That was really beautiful, Buffy,” Mom whispered from the head of the table. “I admit I’ve had my reservations, but I honestly believe, looking at the two of you… I don’t want you to think you’ll never fight, or…”

Spike chuckled slightly, huskily, and his fingers twiddled a little in Buffy’s palm, making her jerk. “Oh, we’ll fight, Mum. Probably all the bloody time.” He sobered just as abruptly as he had laughed. “But Buffy knows I don’t leave. And I don’t break people. That’s not how I’m made. Rather break meself, first.”

“No,” Buffy answered, as surely.

“Done, then.”

Giles was shaking his head, obviously incapable of dealing with everything that was going down. “This doesn’t make one bloody bit of sense, Buffy.”

Buffy smiled slightly, feeling beyond incredibly right with her world. Which was ridiculous, because it was in shambles. Everything was upside down. Her town was a disaster. Her school was home to a heretofore-unseen evil (again), come from beneath to destroy her world. One of her teachers was evil (and dead). An almost-boyfriend, samesies, or at least his moral compass was just way off. Which, you know, was kind of par for the course for the land of Buffy. /At least when it comes to picking out china patterns with the semi-evil, I know to pick the devil I do./ Because otherwise… 

Out there, beyond those curtains where the light leaked in, gauzy, from the streetlamps, reality beckoned. But that was tomorrow. “Maybe not. But it’s real.” The dreamy unreality that had never faded since the motel room steadied now as she looked out of the gap in between said curtains, through the miraculously unbroken window and into the night. The sun would come up tomorrow and the light would shine in. Spike would be here, with her. That was real; the one real, good thing in all this mess. The rest…

It felt like a bad nightmare had faded, and left behind a certain incredible clarity. Like a Slayer dream, almost. “Sometimes the things that happen in the space between time are more real than the stuff that happens out in the real world. And when you come back… they stay.” She turned back, lifted her gaze to meet Giles’ thunderstruck eyes. “This stays.”

“I… That is to say…”

Mom pushed back her chair then, and stood. “I think that about covers it, Rupert. Thank you for coming by, but it’s late and I’m ready for bed. And I think both these young people have to be exhausted after the events of today, and obviously you all have a long day ahead of you tomorrow, so…”

Giles blushed abruptly, looking completely wrong-footed at Mom’s clear disapproval. It was as if he had just in that moment realized that he had waltzed in and taken over dinner conversation with an attempt at condemnation of his host’s daughter and a paramour her mother clearly looked on with a certain fondness… and all the while he had not even touched the dinner put in front of him for the sake of propriety. “Oh. Yes. Well, of course. I really must be getting on in any case…”

“I’m sure Buffy will see you tomorrow, eventually. After she’s had a decent night’s sleep.”

“Yeah. I’ll check in.”

“Yes. Yes, quite. Ah, good evening.” Giles was actually something close to stammering as he rose, pushed back his chair, and, with a little bob that wasn’t quite a nod, headed for the door. “I’ll just… er, let myself out, then.”

“Have a good evening, Rupert.” Mom’s voice was pleasant as ever on the surface, but underneath? Stony as those rocks around Simi Valley, and damn. When she dismissed someone, she didn’t even screw around.

Once the door had shushed closed behind Giles, Spike promptly leaned back in his chair, disengaged his hand from Buffy’s, let out a long, slow breath, and flung his arms behind him to dangle on either side of himself in probably the most theatrical pose she had ever seen from him. “Joyce, you are a queen among women.”

“He was starting to annoy me,” she answered placidly, and moved to gather up her plate and glass. “Are either of you finished?”

Buffy let out her own breath and shook out her shoulders, then, with an amused glance at her vampire, lifted her eyes to her mother. “Go ahead and leave it, Mom. We’ll get the dishes.”

“If you’re sure.” She eyed them a little. “If I’m tired, you both have to be exhausted.”

Buffy actually felt kind of wired. Like, really wished Spike had that chip out right now kind of wired, needed to maybe go for a run wired. Probably it was relief or something. “Yeah, I’ll crash at some point. Spike’ll be up half the night and fall out around five or whatever…”

“Oh, right. I keep forgetting. Vampire. Well…” Mom nodded toward the living room. “The TV’s all yours, Spike. Just keep it down to acceptable volumes.”

“Of course. Cheers, Mum.”

Buffy watched her mother move around for a moment, dithering, and warmth flooded her. “Thank you, Mom. For everything.”

Mom shook her head a little, a tiny answering smile gracing her face though she never once met Buffy’s eye. “For what, baby?” she asked, and turned away, heading for the stairs. “House rules,” she pointed out as she started up, a low, half-stern, and was it half-teasing? reminder. 

“Bloody hell,” Spike murmured as she vanished past the cutouts.

“Guess we really need to get that thing out of your head ASAP, then,” Buffy muttered back, “because if I don’t get to jump your bones, I for sure need to punch something that knows how to punch back.”

A short silence met her pronouncement, then, hesitantly, “You really gonna negotiate to get the bloody thing out of me, pet?”

She met his gaze, startled. “Yes. For sure. I want it as far from you as we can get it, like yesterday. Ugh.”

He closed his eyes, bit his lip briefly. “Four days ago I thought you lived to torment me. Now the only thought that could ever torment me is bein’ away from you. I better not ever lose you, Buffy, or I’ll dust. Just thought you ought to know it.”

/Oh, wow./ “Then I guess I’d better stick around.”

He growled, and his eyes popped back open to pin her with a fierce blue glare. “You bloody well better, Slayer, or there’ll be hell to pay. You better not get tired, yeah, or start courtin’ death as a way out. ‘Cause I’m here to help. To take some of the burden. I’ll keep you, dammit, till you think life’s way too good to ever wonder what it’s maybe like to rest.”

“What…”

He pushed himself to his feet. “Never mind. Let’s get these sodding dishes done and go for a run, yeah?”

/Oh,  _ yeah _ ./

They made quick work of the plates and cutlery, Buffy washing, Spike rinsing and drying, and then wordlessly exited the kitchen door. Stood together for a moment on the back porch under the moon, the chill air of early December eddying around them in faint gusts of light breeze. Off to the right a palm tossed a little, fitfully in the dark like a giant’s sleeve swishing in passing through the greenery, and to the left a cycad squatted, somnolent as a toadstool and more ancient than the dinosaurs. Ahead of them, parting the grasses, the faint path ran down between the greenery, from porch to the alley between yards. Buffy halted on the top step, waited. Felt his muscles bunch next to her and bent a little, arcing her body.

They moved as one into a lope; running into the night, feral and silent, with only the faint whooshing of their passing in their ears. There were no cars. Nothing stirred around them. The town was silent, huddling in fearful stillness as it listened with bated breath to see if the crisis was over. As they passed over side-streets and through lawns they heard nothing, saw no movement. All the fires were out. The town even looked somewhat right, in the darkness, all the damage hidden in shadow. 

At Heatherly Park they paused by the merry-go-round and Buffy leaped on, her momentum sending the thing spinning. Spike grinned, darted forward to slam his palm against one of the bent bars, adding kinetic energy to the slow, grinding rumble of the aging attraction, then stepped smoothly on to join her, leaning in over the central pillar with its worn bearings and gimbals, all sparkling gaze and platinum hair loose and wild in the night. “Slayer wants to play.”

Lifting her hand, still breathing hard from the run, but somewhat more settled, Buffy grazed his lips with her thumb, cupped his cheek. “No,” she answered quietly, and certitude filled her. “I don’t do that.” And she kissed him.

***

They walked back hand in hand from the park, somewhat calmer and more prepared to face the evening with fortitude. Buffy laid her head on his shoulder, on leather cooled in the night, the scents of him filling her nostrils. The feel of his contentment stole over her like a legible thing, the way it calmed his body, stilled his usually-frenetic being. When they reached the stairs, headed up, and he turned to part from her at the guest room, she shook her head, tugged him toward hers. 

“Buffy,” he protested, and shot a glance down the hall toward Mom’s room, looking anxious again. 

He was hilarious. Big Bad rule-breaker, swaggering punk-rock badboy everywhere but under Joyce Summers’ roof, and then he was the most complete puppy, truly worried he was going to get his nose slapped with a newspaper if he misbehaved. “Oh, stop. Just c’mon. I haven’t even had my shower yet, much less brushed my teeth. You think I’m gonna break house rules? I wanna show you something.”

He grumbled as he trailed her to her bedroom doorway. “Easy for you to say, Slayer. Joyce won’t kick you out if you fuck up.”

“That’s all you know.”

He started. “When did…”

“After Acathla.” It came out clipped, even after all this time, as she fought down the old pain of betrayal, the child’s agony at having been cast aside by the second of two parents. /Is it any wonder I’m scared to death that Giles will wanna throw me away too?/

Spike’s eyes widened. “What the bloody… You had to save the sodding world, Buffy! Why would Joyce…”

“Because she didn’t want me to die,” Buffy answered softly, and pulled him in. “So she said if I left, I better not ever come back.”

He narrowed them at her then. “And you took her at her word, is it? Took that ultimatum, what she gave you to try to keep you there, as a disinvite, and, what?”

“Left. After I sent him to hell. Went to LA.”

He buried his face in his left hand. “Oh, Christ. Oh, pet…”

“What?” Relinquishing his hand, she moved away toward her dresser and began to poke at the items atop it without really seeing them. “I did okay.” She knew the pain showed in her voice, knew he could read it. Tried hard not to look at him, and failed anyway.

He eyed her for a moment through his spread fingers. “How long?”

She bit the inside of her cheek and did not answer for a moment, instead fingering the music box her father had left her; a treasured old thing lined with pink satin, with a ballerina forever dancing over a mirror. She could start it now, let it commence its little segment of Swan Lake across the glass, ignore the question…

“Buffy. How long?”

She managed a shrug. “A few months. I came back eventually, after I found out the job followed me. Closed down a demon slave ring in the city. Came home. Got yelled at by everyone for leaving. Dealt with my PTSD. Met Faith. Ran into Angel again, all back from hell and feral. Got yelled at by everyone for keeping him hidden. Had to almost kill Faith by stabbing  _ her _ . Put her into a coma, when she could’ve been me. Blew up my school and watched half my class get eaten or sired.” She tried on a quavery little smile. “Watched Angel walk away from me, then had a nice summer break and started college,” she wrapped up bravely, and fought to keep the tears at bay when he stared at her in shock. 

“Oh, love,” he whispered, and closed with her. 

“It’s okay,” she managed, and shook her head. “Like I said, I dealt with it. I’ve moved on…”

“No, I hardly think so, pet,” he answered, and brushed her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “Christ, no wonder you understand confusing families and fighting back against pain for your place. For just a little bit of something to call yours.” His eyes were swimming with emotion as he touched her. “Bloody hell, you’ve seen more before you left secondary than I did before I died the first time.”

She sniffled, feeling  _ too _ seen. “I didn’t… come in here to get all weepy at you. I brought you in here to show you something.”

“Oh,” he answered, soft and aware. “Changin’ the subject, is it?”

“Yes.” She turned, awkward and fighting for stability. Reached out to fumble open her jewelry box. And felt his eyes on the back of her neck when she lifted the false bottom… and pulled out his ring. Held it carefully between thumb and forefinger, uncertain exactly what to say. She honestly had no idea why she was showing him tonight, except… well. He should probably know she still had it.

His eyes, when she turned back to meet them, were illegible. “Didn’t toss it out, then?” he asked quietly.

“No.” She shook her head briskly. So hard to talk around the tightness and the lump in her throat. “I couldn’t do that. It’s yours.”

A slow, sweet smile dawned on his face. He reached out, covered her hands with his. Folded his palm, his fingers over the ring and met her eyes with that intensity of his that sometimes absolutely overwhelmed her. “No,” he told her softly. “It isn’t.” He dropped his hand then, and the sweet smile morphed into one of those quirked, semi-sarcastic ones he wielded so easily. “You don’t have to hide it anymore, though, do you?”

“No,” she heard herself say as he moved into her space. “I don’t.” Didn’t cavil when he plucked it from her fingers to drop it lightly in the box, but merely reached out to touch his face. “Neither do you.” It was half statement, half question.

He seemed amused by this, but did not refute her observation. Nor did he protest when she caught his hands, drew him around to pull him down on the bed across from her. House rules didn’t mean they couldn’t sleep together. And this time no one was going to be on the floor. 

They lay there for a while like that, knees and elbows touching, just looking at each other. And eventually she blushed a little at his candid regard, and flickered a smile that seemed to grow under the light of his gaze as it never did under the sun. At which point he smiled back, all brief pain and sarcasm gone; and it was that one smile, the boyish and open one. 

That night he stayed on a bed with her. And this time he faced her, and she faced him… and they were on the same level. And neither of them were afraid.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
One chapter to go! Which seriously was just gonna be a 'get the chip out and wrap up things with the Initiative leftovers and summarize the Gentlemen' epilogue... but wouldn't you know that doing that took up way more wordage than one can generally fit in an epilogue?  



	24. (aka It Was Gonna Be Just An Epilogue, But Then…)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok... here we go! The final chapter, at least of this part of the story.
> 
> I just wanted to say that this tale received a reception that I absolutely did not expect, considering the opening subject matter. I talked myself out of writing it about nine times, and almost talked myself out of posting it any number of times after I started it. Over and above the whole (perfectly-timed) Challenge on Elysian Fields, chatting with OYB convinced me to give it a shot both times (thank you OYB!!!), but I definitely did not think it would be my most popular story by any stretch. As such, I really appreciate everyone's enthusiasm. It's been an exercise in the most subtle bit of storytelling I've ever done to date, and I'm grateful to all of you for being there with me. I hope some of you will come along for the (because it's me) quite a bit lengthier sequel, with all the smooshy (and occasionally tense) established relationship stuff. Oh. And all the continued Spoyce snuggling, because it gives me life.
> 
> Oh: wolf_shadoe warns me to give a **CW for Brain Surgery** in here, so if that's a squick, keep your eyes open to start skimming when the hospital segment starts. It ends, um... *checks*  
Actually, there's no real convenient way to mark that one. You'll just have to skim. They talk about feeding Spike after the surgery; I guess look for 'human blood' being referenced in a debate?
> 
> I still owe a ton of you comment replies. Know I'm seriously grateful for every one of you!!!

Of course, she had a Slayer dream that night. One that started out like a sex dream (which was totally understandable, considering), though it very quickly morphed into something disturbing as hell. She was in the shower, making her reacquaintance with said appliance with moaning appreciation—which had actually happened, by the way, once she had eventually torn herself from the bed-full-o-Spike—and was just soaping up her hair when Spike appeared at the curtain—which definitely hadn’t happened, because he had had better sense than to tempt himself when they both knew she was a great deal less hung up on ‘house rules’ than he was. (They could be quiet, right? Mom was sleeping.)

Probably the reason for the dream. Wish-fulfillment was a heck of a thing. Or at least, that was how the dream had started out. Except that once Spike stripped down at her finger-curling invite and stepped into the steamy environs of her soon-to-be shower-for-two, things went all wonky before they could get fun. 

He had just gotten those deliciously cool hands around her waist, had just moved to press that sinful body against hers (which she was sure would be a divine contrast to the heat of the shower, and by the way, note to self to try that out as soon as humanly—or vampirically—possible) when a creepy-ass little girl like something out of  _ The Shining _ showed up in the bathroom doorway (like, knock, much?) and informed them in a straight-up Freddy Kreuger-style sing-song about someone called ‘the gentlemen’ and some creepy crap about peeping toms knocking on doors and windows and not being able to cry or scream.

Talk about stepping all over someone’s very wet dream.

Buffy woke up abruptly in Spike’s cool embrace (which, incidentally, probably explained the hell of a lot about her dream that couldn’t be otherwise explained by certain in-shower fantasies). Shoved at his shoulder to wake him in turn since he had, amazingly, fallen out—he was apparently more bushed than he seemed if he could cash out at only like three AM—and, when he didn’t stir, opened her mouth to speak his name, because he seriously slept like a rock.

Except, when she tried to speak, nothing came out.

Things devolved rather quickly after that, starting with getting her logy vampire awake. Which, by the way, eventually took literally knocking him off the bed to rouse him, an action which earned her serious glare-age, but, like, okay. She was glad he didn’t have nightmares when he was in her arms, and for that she would definitely snuggle with him every chance she got while he slept, but this was an emergency! 

Once Spike was up, though, and realized he had abruptly developed total laryngitis, he swiftly became more productive. Like Spike do, when Spike can no talk much. 

Her vampire was nothing if not kind of yappy. He didn’t seem to take kindly to having his snappy comebacks surgically removed in his sleep. Though, to be fair, Buffy honestly couldn’t blame him for that. She preferred having all her own quips in place as well, thank you very much, and if it came down to trading irritable, sleepy barbs with her guy, she would definitely prefer it to be snark-to-verbal-snark rather than with the nonverbal glare-fest before they both subsided into confused silence.

Buffy’s first move after that was to reach for her bedside phone. His damning eyebrow-raise—all but calling her a dope to her face—put paid to that idiotic notion. With a heavy sigh that, too, was utterly inaudible, she scribbled a quick note for Mom, something along the lines of ‘If you wake up and can’t talk, don’t panic, we’re going to go get to the bottom of it’, and they headed out for Giles’ place to see if they were the only ones affected. 

Buffy’s eyes were sandy from lack of sleep—seriously, three hours, though?—and she was definitely more than a little peeved by the time they pulled up at Giles’ place. Though, her mood improved significantly in between banging on the door and Giles’ appearance, what with wrestling with her silent-but-antsy vamp, who had apparently decided to take this opportunity while she was incommunicado to fondle her butt. Handsy monster.

She couldn’t squeal in surprise, but she so could sidle away and slug him on the arm for being inappropriate in times of emergency. His unrepentant grin as he rubbed his bicep, though, indicated that he found his actions had included absolutely no wrongdoing, and his expression, if she read it right, informed her that he was just trying to lighten the mood or something along those lines. 

Incorrigible. 

She liked him. Not that she would admit that to anyone right now, because now was really not the time. And he should so stop sniffing the air like that before Giles got here. Right now she couldn’t even tell him he was a pig for getting her all… slick when there was a crisis.

Turning away from the knowing glint in his eyes, she rapped the door again with serious purpose. The hollow sound of it echoed malevolently in the over-quiet night; a double faux-pas at this hour and in the tense hush of all that lay unspoken. The silence pressed on her ears like a tangible weight.

By the time Giles finally roused and came to the door, nettled, with his hair all mashed on one side and looking very pissed off, it became apparent that the speechless thing wasn’t just a Spike-and-Buffy-only affair. Her Watcher wrenched his door wider, stared at them in shock, opened his mouth to berate them about the late hour and, judging by his expression, maybe even to tell them to ‘please do bugger off’ and let him sleep… but nothing came out.

The look of alarm on his face was almost comical.

A quick, drive-by survey of the rest of the Scoobies netted them the same results. It was a very unhappy, unsettled, and sleepless bunch which eventually gathered at the apartment under cover of not-quite-dawn. 

Even the yawning was silent. The stillness was oppressive. The scratch of pens on paper sounded like jet planes as they scribbled furiously at their troubleshooting.

‘Seriously,’ Xander wrote on his pad, scrounged from one of the eight million legal pads Giles had laying around, ‘hasn’t this town been through enough?’

‘You’d think,’ Buffy agreed, then relayed her dream in shorthand, because a lot of writing just really sucked. Spike, hearing of said dream for the first time, frowned in concern. 

‘Seven, is it? Seven of what?’

She sent him a tiny shrug; the equivalent of, ‘beats me’.

Spike had lifted his eyes to Giles and grinned broadly. ‘Bet you’re glad this business happened with the Hellions, Watcher. Kept you from inviting your bird over like you were planning. Unless you’re one of those blokes likes their shags silent.’

Giles turned a kind of plum color and actually threw a pen at Spike like it was a dart.

/Wow, edgy, much? And also, Giles has a girlfriend?/

Spike just grinned even more broadly, mouthed, ‘Ta’ at him, and kept the pen for himself as a backup.

‘Wait. Giles was gonna invite a girl over?’ Xander demanded in writing, and lifted his pad to wave it around incredulously.

‘An orgasm friend?’ Anya wrote and flapped her notebook, looking excited for Giles’ sake.

Giles looked ready to flee.

Willow waved her pad of paper hard enough to get everyone’s attention, then scribbled furiously for a second and held up her pages emphatically. ‘Let’s please stay on topic. I so don’t want to hear about Giles’ love life.’

Finger-snapping brought them back to Giles’ corner. ‘Yes, please.’ Giles was no longer turning weird colors as he rose and headed for a pile of books, because when in doubt, research. ‘The Gentlemen, is it?’ he wrote with his new pen, and lifted his brows in Buffy’s direction.

‘Yup.’

And so it began. 

It ended quickly, though not without a little bit of extra fanfare. There were newscasts about how ‘poor, plagued Sunnydale, already the victim of gang violence, has been struck by mass laryngitis’. The local National Guard base, called in to help right the mess left by the Hellions, was having a tough time getting things set to rights when they couldn’t pass orders back and forth, and the local cops were too busy freaking out or keeping the already-flipped-out locals under wraps to do much good. People were wandering around distressed or carrying mini white-boards strapped to their necks. There were looting attempts, closed stores—the ones that hadn’t been broken into already or firebombed—people were attending massive church meetings like it was Judgment Day… It was craziness. 

Then there was a murder, and a heart went missing. 

They figured it out after the first murder. On the second night, while Willow and some Wicca friend of hers fought off a few of the heart-reaper jerks at the campus, Buffy and Spike trailed the rest of the weirdos in straightjackets to City Hall and found the creepy, toothy demons up in the clock tower. Spike helped her fight off the nasty minion things and smashed the box for her, and wham. End of haunting. 

The way the Gentlemen’s heads exploded, though, all yellow and with the pus? She could have done without that. “Is my voice really that bad?” Buffy asked him as they tromped back down out of the tower.

“Best thing I’ve heard all bloody week.”

“Well, that’s okay, then.”

Since she had her voice back and the city was starting to turn right-side up again, Buffy used her dorm to make a quick phone call—now that phone calls were, like, a thing she could do—to Angel Investigations. She caught Cordelia, thank goodness, and not her ex. “Hey, Cordy.”

‘Oh. Buffy. What’s up?’ She sounded bored, of course. ‘Drama? Need to talk to Angel?’

“Not really, no.” Buffy actually felt kind of… meh about the prospect of talking to her ex, which was surprising. Usually the thought of calling LA filled her with a strange push-pull of yearning-agony. Now it was all sort of… muted. Distant. Like Angel was actually an ex for real. ‘I just wanted to give you guys the heads up that Harmony is heading your way.”

There was a short pause on the other end of the line, then, ‘Um, okay, no offense, Buffy, but your excuses for calling are starting to get uber lame. If you want to talk to tall, dark, and salty, just…’

“No, seriously, I don’t need to talk to him. I just wanted to warn you. Harmony’s a vampire, and she’s heading to LA to try to get an acting job. But she’s suffering from a serious case of broken heart, and she might hit you up for some shoulder time. I just thought I should let you…”

‘Hold up. Harmony’s a  _ what?’ _ For the first time in the conversation, Cordelia no longer sounded bored.

“A vampire.” Buffy was actually surprised. “You didn’t know?” Those two were seriously besties in high school. Buffy was aware that they’d had a little bit of a falling out over the whole Xander-dating thing, but still. /Wow; how lonely is Harmony, if she hasn’t even talked to  _ Cordelia? _ / 

For the first time it hit Buffy, the Slayer, now painful it must be, how divisive from one’s previous life, to be sired and have to break off contact from all one’s friends, family, and miscellaneous loved ones to avoid hurting them. How lonely it must be to be a baby demon. To feel so abruptly different, to be thrown into another world, possibly totally against one’s will, and to wake up all intertwined with another entity—or _as_ another one? Part of? Hosting? Just different? Whatever, become part of a different existence—but without sire or family or connection a lot of the time. Just… adrift, with no clue how to navigate any of it. / _ Oh _ ./

And then… Harmony had had only Spike to cling to, and that relationship had been… really not a good one. /Oh, damn./ Jeez, no wonder she was so screwed up over it. /No wonder all baby vamps act like vicious sinkholes!/ 

‘Try,  _ no!’ _ Cordelia was ranting over there in LA. ‘I so didn’t!’ She actually sounded… maybe offended to be not in the know, which was… good, ish, for Harmony? Or maybe Cordy was just mad she hadn’t gotten all the juicy gossip. Who knew?

“Yeah, I, um, guess it happened at graduation.” 

Cordelia sounded floored. ‘God, what a bummer.’

“Yeah.”

‘No wonder she dropped off the map. I thought she just found a loser after and rode him all the way to Florida or something.’

“Um, okay.” /In which case, wouldn’t she, like, call you and dish or something?/ Sometimes Cordelia could be totes self-absorbed. Not that Buffy thought it was Cordy’s fault that her former bestie had gone off the grid and been busy doing the new baby vamp thing, but still. Wow.

‘Well, that explains the radio-silence. A vampire?  _ Really? _ Huh… Well… that’s Sunnydale for ya.’

It… really kinda was. “Yeah. And she just got out of a really bad relationship with this other, older vampire…” Behind her, Spike’s hands, winding around her waist, his lips nibbling at her neck. Scattering her thoughts. “Which is, you know…” Breathing. Breathing was a thing. And humanizing Harmony to Cordelia, if Cordelia… “Hm.” Ever saw… anyone else as human… “…Not really so much about her, or him… Just a, you know, personality clash…”

‘You okay over there, Buffy?’

“Uhuh.”

Spike nipped her neck, and she bucked a little, every ounce of heat in her body rushing south at a high rate of speed, following the tracks of his hands at her sides, to her hips. Everything between her legs pulsed, and she gasped. 

Oh. Biting. “Um… I’m not saying…” Couldn’t humanize… whatsername. Harmony too much, since if Cordy helped her past a certain point, Harmony might eat… “Just be careful if she does… show. She’s been through…” 

Spike’s hand slipped to cup her upper thigh, just below her… “Nnnn…”

‘Buffy, you sound like you need a moment alone. Don’t get me wrong, it’s just, I’m not gay and I never thought you were either, so if you called me to have phone sex with you, I’ll remind you I’m not Angel…’

The name was like cold water dashed over Buffy, and she jabbed an elbow into Spike’s belly. “Stop it!” she hissed, and cleared her throat. “Sorry. I was being distracted. I’m good. I’ll let you g… Oh!” Spike, always the misbehaving beast, had gone right back to nuzzling where he’d nipped her, damn him.

‘Seriously, Buffy, you don’t sound like yourself. Are you okay?’

Spike took the phone from her preparatory to hanging it up. “She’s fine. Aren’t you, pet?” The rumble of his voice on her neck was so not helping. “Just needs to remember we’re not anywhere there are house rules…”

/Oh God…/ “Cordy, I’ve gotta go…”

The phone was already moving toward the cradle, to the tune of a profound silence from the other end of the line. Buffy halted it with a sharp grab, though, when Cordelia’s voice rang through, amused and a little surprised. ‘Got a new guy, huh?’

/Oh, dammit./ Buffy grabbed the phone away from Spike and gave him a hard shove toward the bed. He stumbled back to fall on his ass on the mattress, where he landed with a grunt and watched her, looking a little hurt and mildly amused, maybe slightly irritated. “So anyway, just wanted you to know. I’ll talk to you later, Cordelia…”

‘Is he English? He sounds English. Oh, wow, can I tell Angel? That would so make my week. I mean, also not, because he would be the literal worst to be around, but he broods all the time anyway, so it probably couldn’t get much worse…’

Alarm flooded Buffy. “Could we not? I so don’t need him racing up here to get all weird about it.”

Behind her, Spike muttered something that involved the words ‘sweetie-bear’. She threw him a quelling look, because she really didn’t have time for vampire jealousy right now. “Look, I’ve gotta, um, get to class, but I just thought I’d…”

‘No, yeah; I appreciate it. Though… Wait. Did you say she’s coming to try out acting? Because that is so my stomping grounds. She better not try and take any of my gigs. If that girl tries to swing in here with a bunch of fancy vampire charisma and…’

Spike made a loud, contemptuous noise from over on the bed, eyebrow raised in scorn.

Seeing him all sprawled out on her bed like that was doing things to Buffy. And since she really didn’t have class for, oh, say, another hour or so… “I think you’re okay. I don’t think Harmony inherited a lot of vamp charisma.” Buffy was quite honestly paying zero attention to the language coming out of her mouth anymore as she watched her guy, who was slowly and consciously stripping off his duster to lay it aside. Was now sitting on the bed with his hands on his lap. High up on his lap, framing his wide-spread legs and his… um, occupied jeans. And, of course, he was doing that thing with his tongue, his head cocked just a little to the side, like he was asking her a question, or maybe posing a dare.

He looked like some kind of sinful valentine. Nnnggh.

‘Oh. Well, good. Uh, okay, well, have a nice life with your new guy, Buffy.’

/That’s the plan. Commencing in three, two…/

‘I’ll keep my mouth shut around Angel, since I like my job without excess mope-age.’ A faint sigh. ‘The coffee’s bitter enough around here without sour grapes.’

“Thanks, Cordelia.” Hanging up, Buffy swung on her vampire and glared at him. “Seriously, do you  _ want _ him here getting in the way?”

“I can take him,” Spike answered, and leaned back on his hands. The tongue curled, did a little instigating tap-dance behind his teeth. “How fast do you think he can drive up? You wanna give him a show?”

/Oh my God, you are such a dope./ “So not the point.” Of their own accord, her feet were dragging her closer. 

He made a face then, all cocksure challenge gone, and his eyes flickered briefly away. “S’not because you don’t wanna tell him?”

/Oh, jeez./ Buffy rolled her eyes and moved to sit next to him. She could understand the ego thing, but seriously. Just, really? “I can’t with you. If you two wanna fight over me like I’m some kind of… prize from a vending machine, go do it somewhere else. Like in another country, okay? Because I’m not…”

Hands up like he was entering a firing zone, Spike shook his head. “Not doin’ that, Slayer, I swear. I just… There’s a lot of history there. With me an’ him. With me and him an’ Dru. Then you. And…” He shrugged. “It’s gonna be tough for me. But it’s not about you, most of the time, yeah?”

She fought to nod, keep it contained. “Okay. Well then, try to keep it over there, alright, and off of me? Because I didn’t ask for it. I just kind of fell into it by accident.”

He nodded solemnly, and lifted his hand to touch her cheek. “There’s one competition with him I’m bloody well bound to win, though.” 

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

He drew her down on the bed. She went willingly, twined her legs in his.

And then Wil walked in, fresh from Philosophy or whatever, and turned into embarrassed mouse. And dammit, they needed somewhere to go that was  _ not _ Mom’s house and  _ not _ a dorm room and  _ not _ populated with rising-from-the-dead vampires!  _ Stat! _

The back seat of the DeSoto was looking better and better, for real. Maybe if the door was kicked open or something.

Buffy’s days outside of class were spent helping to put the town back together. Her evenings and Spike’s were spent trying to help put Willy’s back together and to seeing what kind of damage had been done to the demon community by the soldiers. Clem and his new roommate were doing fine thus far, though a mostly-recovered Willy seemed desperate to escape the Loose-Skinned demon’s mother hen routine and get back to his bar. “Got cleanin’ up to do. Got clientele to hunt down, see who’s still kickin’. Got money to collect…”

He winced at her expression. The less he said about that whole bet thing, the better. “Appreciate all you’re doin’, Slayer,” he hastened to add, “but no offense… Probably a lot of ‘em are hiding from you.” 

He had a point. They wouldn’t know she was trying to help. Ish. To them it would look like a shakedown as much as anything. Which, she supposed, was fair, since if she caught anyone up to no good while she was wandering around their side of town she’d do something about it, and it all really just highlighted how she didn’t fit real well in either world. 

“‘S alright, Slayer,” Spike told her with a caress. “You fit with me. We’ll figure out a place, since I don’t much fit anymore either. In either spot.” 

She had never been more grateful for anyone than she was for Spike. Now that it had been pointed out to her how very much she stood astride two worlds, straddling that line, she could no longer unsee that truth. She might’ve gone nuts if it wasn’t for the company to help her keep her head on straight.

The morning of the first day post-Gentlemen, while the National Guard were still all over everywhere to excuse their presence, Buffy noticed a few suspicious-looking military personnel hovering around campus where some students had begun to trickle in to resume classes. This bunch didn’t look like the same sort of soldiers… and more interestingly, they all seemed concentrated in and around Lowell House. /And, here’s our moment./

Buffy wasn’t even shy about it. She marched right up to the bereted guy sitting out front at the booth pretending to recruit for the ROTC and announced, “So. I have a proposition for you guys. If you don’t want me to go to the papers about what Professor Walsh was doing down there with the remains of what I’m assuming were an American soldier and a bunch of demon parts, maybe we could make a deal. Because I want something from one of your surgeons. I’m assuming there are still a few around.”

The military guy stared at her in horror, then snapped his fingers to call over another guy with fewer bars on his sleeves, muttered a brief conversation, and sent him rabbiting back into the building. A second or two later a guy with graying temples and a bitter-looking, lined face exited Lowell house to eye her as if she were some kind of unwanted curiosity. “You’re this… ‘slayer’, I take it?” He asked without preamble.

She was taking a big risk and she knew it, identifying herself to these outsiders; but then she was already known. Riley would have named her to them. Might as well go in for a pound or however the saying went. “Are you guys shutting down, here?” she asked quietly.

The lined face tightened a little. “The situation here is no longer viable. Some of the… side-projects were not advisable and had not been fully checked out. The Initiative is to be summarily closed down and all personnel debriefed and relocated. I’m sure with their excellent service records they will find action in other high-sensitivity projects without difficulty.”

/‘Initiative’. Neato./ Buffy filed that moniker away for future reference. “So, in other words, you’re leaving my town. Great. Then I won’t have to make a big fuss.” Buffy tilted her head. “Okay, about that surgeon…”

The big man, she was assuming an officer, watched her with interest for a second, then straightened. “For this hostile who works with you? Agent Finn indicated you had one in your… stable of associates.”

/‘Agent’ Finn, huh?/ “He has some kind of behavior modification chip in his brain. I don’t trust your people not to use it in the future, and I don’t want anyone to come back here and put any of my people in a virtual Skinner’s Box.” Yes, she had read that chapter while they were all sitting around with ‘laryngitis’, and it had filled her with a vast, undefined rage at the thought of the things these people could do to her vampire. To any living (or unliving) creature, demon or no. “I want it out, just as much as I want you gone.”

The officer’s mouth tightened. “It doesn’t bother you that without it this… ally of yours is free to feed on humans?”

“He won’t. He’s mine.”

Eyes on hers, chilly and calculating. “You sound very sure.”

Buffy was under no illusions when it came to Spike. She knew what and who he was. Every day would be a choice for him, and sometimes it would come down to every moment. But what it really came down to was what he wanted more; a specific kind of blood and a lifestyle… or her. /Us./ She could either trust that, or she could give it all up. But if she was going to trust… it was all or nothing.

She had chosen to trust. And more importantly, she had chosen to believe that he was capable of making that choice. /That’s the difference between the me of then and the me of now./ “They’re not animals. They’re people, with loyalties and reason, some of them, even if the reasons are things we can’t understand. Sometimes those motives are things we can’t live with and we have to destroy each other. Sometimes we can live beside each other just fine.” She met the officer’s suspicious eyes firmly. “They might not be the same species as us, but that doesn’t make them things.”

Officer guy went all bland and disapproving. “You seem very certain you can convince the world of our supposed misdeeds without being considered insane. But you have no proof, and you must know you have a background. Burnt down your school gym in LA, I understand, and spent some time in a mental institution.” A hard smile. “I wouldn’t think you’d want to risk another sojourn as a guest of the State of California Regional Mental Health Association…”

/Oh, you  _ bastard _ ./ He could never know how much that threat literally terrified her; how it weakened her knees and hollowed out her belly with dread. No one ever could. 

She firmed her stance, locked her knees, faced him down. If she hadn’t folded to Ted, who had had her own mother firmly in his grip and ready to send her off at a moment’s notice— _ again— _ she wouldn’t go down to this uniformed goon who didn’t know her from Eve.

Buffy never flinched as she offered the sonofabitch an unmoved, mirthless smile in her turn. She had been ready for threats, anyway. “A lot of kids have issues. Not a lot of people have what I have, though.”

“Oh?” He tilted his head slightly, looking interested in her next move in their little chess game.

“Yeah.” /You fucking asshole./ “I have Spike. And I have the chip in his head.” /Trump card, you absolute prick./ She lifted her chin, smiled sweetly. “Since I have both cooperative proof of the supernatural and proof of your knowledge of and interference in that world inside his head, you’d think you people would want to take that proof away from me ASAP.”

The officer’s grim, lined face tightened, and she knew she had him. “I could have it zeroed by our operatives. You’re aware of that, right?”

Buffy went chilly at him. “You could try.”

A short pause, and then one quick jerk of a nod. “We’re pulling out anyway. It’s on you. He kills anyone, our agents will shoot on sight.”

Buffy felt everything inside her body tighten up and a chill run through her soul. “You’re leaving people behind?”

“For a little while.”

“Anyone in particular?” she heard herself ask, and felt the strangest certainty that she knew the answer.

“We’ve had a few volunteers.” 

And just like that, she knew he wouldn’t be forthcoming with any names. She also had a sneaking suspicion that she wasn’t going to get off so easy with Riley Finn. “Where can I meet the surgeon? I’d like to do it somewhere not here. Don’t get me wrong, it’s just I don’t trust you guys enough to bring any one of my people into that place again where we’d be surrounded. I don’t even wanna go down there myself.”

The officer smiled slightly. “Oh, you’re perfectly safe for the moment, Miss Summers. Your existence as a... ah, normal human being is a matter of public record." The smile broadened to something more than a little evil, and full of sharp teeth. "As is your record of run-ins with the law and a lot of rather strange incidences at night in any number of public locales…”

“Where?” She was starting to get annoyed with the double entendres. /Either threaten or not, but don’t pretend to tell me I’m totally safe and hint that I’m not all at the same time./

The smirk cleared away, to be replaced with a bored expression; all business once more. “You can meet Dr. Snyder at the local hospital at 1900 hours. He will assure that there will be an available surgery bay. Bring your… friend. It should be dark by then.”

“Nineteen…”

“Seven PM.”

“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”

She turned on her heel and left. 

Spike hadn’t wanted to go at first, sure it was a trap. Buffy wasn’t been all that sure it wasn’t, either, but what other choice did they have? So they headed out. To her surprise, Willow met them there, looking nervous but fascinated, dragging an anxious-looking Xander along. 

Spike tensed still more when he saw them, and he’d already smoked about four cigarettes en route. “Let me handle this, okay?” she told him softly.

“Yeah. Sure.” 

Moving forward, Buffy closed with her friends. “I wanna know now. Did you come to stop me? Do a spell or fight me or try to do something to him, or…”

Wil looked away. “No, I…” She shook her head, face pale but set. “I just want to… be here.”

‘Just in case,’ her expression said. ‘Either way, for you.’

/In case I have to dust him./ 

At least her heart was in the right place?

Buffy couldn’t. She swung on Xander. “And you?”

Xander was also pale, also set. He drew himself up, squared his shoulders. “You know I think this is a bad idea. But… I’m here for you, Buff. If…” His eyes darted to Willow’s. “I’m… I’m here for you.”

It had been Willow’s idea, then. 

Alright. Fine. “And if he proves you wrong?” She couldn’t help it if it came out a tad harsh.

Xander let out a short, scoffing breath, shook his head slightly. “Then… no comment. I… want you to be happy, Buffy, even…” He bit, hard and visibly, on the inside of his cheek. At which point, and only then, did Buffy see Willow’s toe retreating from where it had kicked at his heel. 

Well… it was a start. “Fine. But just… stay out of the way, okay? This is brain surgery. And I don’t know if this jerk is gonna do anything weird and hurt him. If he does, I’ll have to do something Slayer-y.”

Xander looked startled at that, Willow thoughtful as Buffy swiveled away, back toward Spike. “C’mon, let’s get this over with.”

The operation itself was creepy, but successful. Buffy had to threaten the attending soldier to leave or she’d kill him, and there was a little bit of a ‘debate’ outside the surgical bay doorway before she informed the jerk that she would personally ensure the surgical team’s safety—as if they’d need it—but that no soldier needed to be on hand with any stupid electrical gun or whatever that thing was. The asshole finally agreed to wait outside the door, at least. Buffy stationed Wil and Xander there instead, Xander with that look in his eye that assured the soldier he’d call if Spike went off the rails. Spike, who had been ready to bail at the inclusion of armed military might, was soothed back into readiness. Not that she blamed him, since the idea of his being put under and made captive again was so not her favorite thing either, and it wasn’t like he could defend himself right now. Finally they moved forward, with Buffy right on the doctor’s ass. 

“You can’t be in here, you know,” he informed her, as if her presence made him all jittery. 

“I’ll wash my hands and wear whatever. But I’m not leaving him in here alone with you people. No offense, but I don’t trust any of you. And I’ll break every one of your necks if you have orders to do anything other than remove the chip in his brain and close him up unharmed.”

The surgeon stared at her, all pale and uncertain, then nodded over at a little bank of stuff on one side. “There’s, um, sanitizer, gloves, a mask, gown…”

She suited up. And saw the way Spike looked at her for doing it. “You sure you wanna do this?” she asked, though, just to ensure that she wasn’t pushing him into something without his consent. Sure, it was probably their one chance to get it done by someone knowledgeable, but still. These were the same jerks who had traumatized him the last time, and this was just one more invasive thing on top of a pretty bad stretch of invasive-ness in a really painful week, and…

Spike didn’t answer, just moved to lay down on the table. He did, though, shoot her a swift, tight, acknowledging look for the question; appreciation amidst the self-saving tension. 

Then the assisting person sidled around the edges of the room to approach him from one corner, holding some Velcro strap-looking things. “Okay, hold up…”

“Oh bloody  _ hell _ no!” Spike growled. 

/Wh…/

“If you move at all, even to breathe, or scratch, or react, or even in reflex, we could cut the wrong area of your brain, and you’d be permanently…”

“I won’t be permanently anything, you pillock! I heal from anything doesn’t turn me to dust; and if you think I’m gonna let anyone from your outfit tie me down, you’ve another think coming! I’ll hold meself still. I won’t even breathe, but get the bloody fuck away from me with those bonds!”

/Oh, God./ “Spike.” Buffy moved closer, one hand still ungloved. Stroked one corded arm, like stone under flesh. “I’ve got you.” He was shaking with rage, ready to launch himself at the surgical assistant and to hell with the chip and humans. “Listen,” she told the man, still stroking. “After what was done to him before, you’re gonna have to accept that he’s not gonna let himself be restrained. And I’m not gonna let you do it either, so if I were you, I’d back off and trust that he’ll hold himself still.”

“But… But if he moves at all…”

Buffy soothed her guy with her eyes, pleading for trust, and he very slowly lay down, reluctant and still snarling under his breath. “He won’t. I take it you don’t know vamps. They can become statues, for hours. Not react to outside stimuli you couldn’t stand if your life depended on it. He’ll be fine.”

The assistant shot a querulous glance at ‘Snyder’, who shrugged and nodded. The restraints were set aside. And now the assistant was seriously anxious about approaching their quiescent subject, for which Buffy couldn’t blame him, but he did it anyway. It showed strength of character. “Uh…” He cleared his throat. “We’re gonna have to, um, shave the hair a little, here by the, um…”

Buffy caught Spike’s hard, unyielding eye. “I was wondering about that one little fuzzy spot.”

He relented slightly, let out a breath, tried to relax. “Yeah, well. Vamp hair takes a long time to grow. Think it also has somethin’ to do with why we don’t ever have to shave.”

Another long stroke down his arm. “Lucky thing, since you can’t see yourself in a mirror.” She caught his hand in her gloved one. “You got this. I’ll even forgive you for getting yourself into such a stupid situation so I have to live without your hair in that spot for a while.”

It made him smile a tiny bit. “Oi. Would you stop with the hair?”

She smiled into his eyes while the low, metallic buzz of clippers filled the silence.

When they turned off she looked up. And saw not a mask and hose and not a needle. Instead the assisting person was handing the surgeon-guy a scalpel, and surgeon-guy commenced to walk straight toward Spike’s head. 

No fucking  _ wonder _ they were going for restraints, and what the actual fuck?

Buffy let go of Spike’s hand like she’d been scalded. “Um, excuse me? Anesthetic much?”

The surgeon halted with his cutting hand raised in preparation to start slicing. “I was told this was an HST.”

She was going to punch him out. 

/No, I’m not, because we need him./ But it took some seriously heavy breathing. “You will not be cutting on a living, breathing, feeling  _ person _ without numbing him, you insensitive  _ asshole _ .”

Still holding his knife at the ready, the surgeon blinked at her over his mask, then nodded slowly at her dangerous tone. “If you say so.” He turned to the assistant. “Avery, can you get a few cc’s of…”

“What, you’re not gonna knock him out? For  _ brain _ surgery?”

The surgeon tilted his head slightly at her. “I understand this sort of HST doesn’t respire gases into his relatively inert bloodstream. There’s no circulation to speak of, since it… he isn’t alive in the… the classical sense. That means a general wouldn’t work anyway. But that doesn’t apply in any case, as this sort of… procedure doesn’t require a general. The brain has no pain receptors. We can do a local. Avery!” he snapped.

“Oh. Right,” the other man jumped, and swiveled to paw through a drawer.

Beside Buffy, Spike’s body relaxed, and she saw his hands, previously in a death-grip on the gurney’s sides, unclench. /Oh, God./ “I’ve got you,” she whispered again.

“I know it, love,” he answered.

The surgeon waited after the half-dozen little shots, prodding and asking Spike if he felt things, waiting for his affirming grunts. It was still awful to listen to the bone-saw shrieking through his skull. Buffy could honestly go the rest of her life and never hear that sound again. She must have asked Spike if he was okay about fifty times through it, but he only answered in short, immobile ‘Yeah’s like he was concentrating hard, face all scrunched up. Once he told her that “It feels odd, pet. Great load of tugging. But nothing so bad as the first time, so that’s fine.”

How he was holding himself still for all of it was beyond her. She would be flipping out to have someone cutting into her body like that. It was so  _ invasive _ . But he had to hold himself still or they’d mess up his brain. /This is nuts./

Eventually, after some long, breathless moments of whispered consultation and anxious-sounding murmurs from the surgical pair, there came the sound of agreement. “We’ll have to clip the leads, you think?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, cut lead A first, or B will fire.”

“Right. Cutting.”

Spike stopped breathing and squeezed down on her hand so hard it felt like being crushed by a glacier. God, he was cold. 

She didn’t flinch, just squeezed back.

Behind his head, an explosive breath. “Got it!”

“Alright. Lifting. Got the plate ready?”

“Ready.”

There was a small click. “Okay, we’ll leave the leads in place. Ready to close…”

“Wait.” Buffy had questions before they did that. “A, let me see it so I know you’re not screwing us."

Spike inhaled for the first time since she couldn’t remember when, and squeezed her hand again, this time in gratitude. 

The plate was held out around his head for her inspection. And there it was; a tiny slip of ceramic and computer wires, no bigger than a thumbnail, green and white and copper with a few trailing, micro-thin wires, all of it shining with blood. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” the surgeon answered blandly. 

“It’s so small,” Buffy whispered.

“Didn’t feel bloody small when it was tasing my sodding brainpan.”

“Yeah. I bet not.” She lifted her head to narrow her eyes at the doctor. “He’ll be okay with the… wires or whatever is still in there?”

“They’re deeply embedded. We’d have to do too much damage to extricate them. Without the modification device they are inactive, and cannot stimulate any electrical potential, because they don’t receive signals from any outside source.”

From the doorway, Buffy could hear fascinated, whispered consultations of the Willow variety, and wondered if maybe her friend might manage to do a spell while these jerks weren’t looking to whisk the damn chip away so they could study this terrifying ‘proprietary tech’ in more depth. Not that she ever wanted it anywhere near Spike again, but… better the devil you knew. “Good. Get it away from him.”

The surgeon nodded wordlessly and handed the plate to ‘Avery’. “Closing,” he repeated, and went back to work on Spike’s head.

After a few more tense minutes he was talking again. “You’ll feel some discomfort as the bone knits. The scalp will itch, of course, but that’ll pass more quickly…”

“Already been through it, you nit,” Spike answered grimly, and flicked his eyes to Buffy. “Likely gonna need blood, love.”

“We’ll get you some on the way out.”

“Appreciate it.”

She ran her thumb up and down the back of his hand in a reassuring caress. 

Once it was all over he actually didn’t look much the worse for wear. The surgical guys scurried out with reluctant thanks from Buffy and even a faint, acknowledging nod each from Spike, and they were alone. She stripped off the stupid, sweaty mask before she suffocated while he sat up, and then she inspected the stitched gash in his skull. “It could be worse. You can probably brush your hair over it and no one will notice…”

“Won’t be able to bleach it till it’s healed, though. Gonna look ruddy awful in a week or so, coming in dark…”

“I never knew you were such a fashionista.”

“Yes you did, you minx. Just as much a one as you are; only I have a better sense of style…”

“Okay, you take that back! You have one style. One! I have dozens…”

He grinned into her décolletage. “How many of ‘em are v-neck? ‘Cause those are my favorite.” And he ran a finger slowly up along her collarbones, the column of her throat.

“You are way too pale to be acting so…”

“Relieved?” he asked, eyeing her under dark brows, and she saw it. Yes, his eyes were red-rimmed again, his lips a little too salmon, the flesh around them slightly translucent… but everything in his expression screamed of reprieve. Of liberation from terror.

He had been under a yoke of constant abuse, never knowing when pain would fall, and from what quarter. Diminished. Like being under the thumb again of an old, insane sire, subject to cruel whims… but an invisible one, and learning new, unspoken rules counter to his very nature. And now he could breathe again. “I get it,” she whispered. 

“Do you, Buffy?” he asked, as quietly. 

“Yeah. I think I do.” It wasn’t about going out to bite, or frolic in the wilds of destruction. It was about not living under threat of agonizing pain. It was about holding his head high and knowing he was whole in himself. 

It was about existing without fear.

“So, um… they’re gone.” Willow’s voice was tentative as she poked her head around the doorjamb. “And I think maybe someone else needs this room to do some other thing?”

“Yeah, I’m not even sure how they got it,” Xander quipped bitterly. “Military rental policy, no substitutions, exchanges, or refunds.”

“Speaking of which…” Will slipped in and held out her hand. Folded up inside of it, in a stiff, blood-spotted paper towel from a nearby bathroom, was the chip that had been extracted from Spike’s brain. “I did a little abracadabra while they were walking by.” She smiled tentatively. “Neat, huh? I doubt they’ll even notice it’s gone from the specimen jar till they’re back at their base camp or whatever…”

Xander grimaced. “And then they’ll come after us…”

“How’re they gonna know we did it, Xan? Neither of us touched them. And anyway, I figured, we probably need to find out how it actually worked, what they were trying to do…” 

“Great idea, Red,” Spike answered tiredly as he recoiled a little. “Just do me a favor and keep the bloody thing away from me, yeah?”

“Oh. Right.” Folding the object back up in its towel, she nodded and tucked it away between the leaves of a textbook and shoved it into her ever-present satchel for safe-keeping. “I’ll, um, let everyone know what I find out.”

“Thank you, Wil. That’s really awesome.” Buffy put all her gratitude into it. She really meant it, after all. Pushing herself up away from Spike’s shoulders, she shook out her own and started stripping off her paper gown. “I guess we better get out of here before they send reinforcements. But we need to go out the back way, because I need to buy Spike some blood so he can heal. That took a lot out of him.” 

Xander jerked, frowned. “Human blood?”

Buffy lifted her eyes to meet his. “Yes. Human blood, because that’s what he actually lives on, Xander, so he’ll heal faster.”

Xander’s lips twisted. “Right.”

What did he want, anyway? Spike was a  _ vampire _ . It was what he was. He couldn’t change it. He wasn’t going to, like, go feral if he tasted human blood again, like some kind of pet cougar who got fed raw meat instead of cooked chicken or whatever. In fact, Buffy wasn’t even sure that was a real thing they did in zoos, or total unscientific bull, since back when they’d visited the zoo they’d had this whole thing about how the animals there ate raw meat because it was what they were  _ supposed _ to eat, and... And was Xan just mad that Spike hadn’t fulfilled his prophecy and leaped up right after the surgery to start running around murdering everyone in sight? “Are we gonna be okay, Xan? Because I don’t wanna fight with you every day over this.”

Xander sighed and rubbed between his eyes with one thumb-knuckle, avoiding Buffy’s gaze, avoiding looking at Spike entirely. “You used to agree with me. Now, all the sudden, you don’t. And I don’t get it.”

Stripping off her gloves, she balled them up with the mask inside the gown, tossed the whole overwarm mess into the ‘bio-waste’ bin. “I learned a thing or two. I grew.”

Xander’s head lifted, and he shot her an anguished look. “I’m  _ losing _ you, Buffy.”

/Okay, really?/ “You’re not losing me unless you decide you’d rather keep your wrong opinions than also learn.” Letting out a breath, Buffy moved to catch Spike’s too-cold hand, hauled him to his feet. Saw his rueful expression and acknowledged it with a grimace. “I’m still right here. You just have to be willing to admit that what we believed has changed.” And with a nod to Willow, she folded her fingers in her vampire’s long, callused ones and led him down toward the bank of elevators.

***

Back in his room at Revello, Spike seemed at least partially recovered, though that probably had a lot to do with Mom’s mothering of him. He’d spent much of the evening with his feet up watching TV, eventually passing out for a while—way early for a vampire—with his head in Buffy’s lap. She had eventually had to rouse him so she could get up to pee, after which he had attempted to navigate the stairs on his own, to fairly disastrous results. (If anyone wanted to know what a very drunken vampire looked like, it looked like brain surgery.)

The upshot was, she had been required to essentially haul him upstairs to bed, and okay, he had been worryingly disoriented for a second or two before he’d made his way along the balustrade with a steadying Slayer in his wake.

“Are you sure you had enough blood?” Leaning on the doorjamb, he was still visibly shaky. /I am so staying in here./ It would be okay. If Mom got mad, Buffy could just say she needed to watch over him in case he had… complications or something. /After all, he did have his skull cut open and crap. That’s dire even for a vampire./ 

“Plenty, pet.” He straightened, eyeing the seldom-used bed as if judging the distance, then shrugged a little and unthreaded his belt in a concession to comfort. “Be right as rain after a bit of kip.” Looked down at the limp coil of leather in his hands, then sighed. “Best keep the trousers on, or you’ll be too bloody tempting, even if I’m flattened. Might just as soon roll over and beg you to have your way with me in spite of all that, and buggered-up brain be damned.”

Buffy smiled and waggled her brows. “I’ll give you a day or so. You’ve built up a lot of anticipation for me. I kind of want you to be an active participant.”

He grumbled a little, tossed aside the belt. “No free rides for this bloke.” Then, throwing himself down on the bed on his back, he sprawled wide, arms akimbo, and smirked at her. “Rather see about our teamwork as well, come to that.” And he twitched his fingertips in a weary sort of invitation.

Shaking her head at his face-saving antics, she drew closer, clambered onto the narrow gap he’d left her on the mattress, settled in. Upon closer inspection, he looked a little translucent around the edges, blood or no blood. “Get in here,” she told him, and gestured to the space between her jaw and breasts. It was pretty much where he had been sleeping of late. Even if he didn’t start out that way, he always seemed to end up there, so might as well just do the thing. “You need some rest. If you’re up to it, we’ll spar tomorrow.” She was way too damned excited about that; to the marrow of her bones.

He didn’t need any further encouragement, and sort of rolled to his knees to crawl into her body, totally ignoring ‘the rules’. “Yeah.” Wrapping his arms around her, he yawned, nuzzled into her breast. “Tomorrow I kick your ass, Slayer.” He was already half asleep. “Can’t bloody wait to get my…” His jaws creaked mightily. “…Hands on you again, show you what a real… fight is… like…” He trailed off, already drifting.

Snorting lightly, Buffy stroked his hair. He was pretty much out. Poor baby. “I hope you play a better game than you talk,” she told the top of his head.

“Mmfff.”

“And there better not be an apocalypse or a new baddie in town tomorrow. Because I fully intend to fight with you and then throw you to the ground behind some crypt and see what all the fuss is about, alright? Even if I have to give you more of my own blood first.”

_ “Mmmmm…” _

She smiled at his half-moan; the more so when he shifted against her in his semi-sleep, and she felt the hard length of his response against her thigh. /Someone’s gonna maybe have some vivid dreams if I keep talking./ Well. It was better than the bad ones he was bound to have after that surgery. 

She drew her fingers through the short curls at his temples, pushed them behind his ears, toward his nape. “I really, really missed fighting you.”

His hips juddered a little against her thigh. This was kind of fun. “Missed me too?”

His mouth opened against her upper breast, a cool waft of breath tickling at her skin. And one gimlet eye opened, blue flecked with gold, to pin her like a bug on a card. “Either tell your mother to go to hell and shag me right now,” he demanded, voice thick, logy, irritated, and husky with want, “or let me sleep, because if you keep on you’re gonna drive me bug-shaggin’ mad, and I’ll end up ruttin’ against your leg like a soddin’ teenager.”

“Well, that’s only fair, since I already did that to you.” He was a hell of a confidence-builder, this guy.

His visible eye narrowed, and he glared fiercely. “Seeking vengeance is cruel,” he told her flatly, and closed it.

“Okay, you’re right.” She sighed. “I just really want you, so I’m fantasizing. I’ll keep it to myself and let you sleep.”

He muttered something that ended in, “…Smell you warm for me, dream of havin’ you, probably wake up a mess like I haven’t since I was a soddin’ infant…”

“I’m kind of tempted to kiss it and make it better,” she admitted.

The muzzy eye opened again, gamely forbidding. “You’ll do no such thing, Buffy, until I’ve had the chance first to show you the error of every other bloody sod’s ways. Now let me sleep, and we’ll take up this conversation tomorrow, yeah?” He lifted his brow meaningfully. “In depth.”

He could be very convincing sometimes. “Okay, but I’m warning you. I intend to spend a lot of time doing things to you, too.”

One heavy hand came up, slid around her neck, dragged her head down to rest on the pillow above his, so that her nose and lips were against his hair. “I’m all bloody yours, Slayer.” He shifted closer again. “Always have been, from the moment I saw you.” He let out a little sigh, went limp in her arms. “You’re the One.”

She kissed the top of his head, smiled into his escaping curls. “So are you.”

As he stilled to silence and his breathing ceased, Buffy looked out through the tiny gap in the curtain, behind the temporary sunblock of blanket, and pondered the bizarre reality that the one vampire she could never shake had become the one vampire she would never want to lose.

“I’m really, really glad you’re so annoying, Spike.” /So glad you never gave up./ She closed her eyes, let the peace come on, not of a spell, but of reality. / _ My _ will be done, this time.  _ Mine _ ./ 

** FIN  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Okay, there it is. Hope you folks enjoyed it!  
  
See you next week on the same posting schedule with the sequel. In keeping with the Shakespearean theme, look out for the title,  
"These Violent Delights".  
  
And, thank you all very much again, from the bottom of my heart.   
(Thanks also, forever, to wolf_shadoe and KSM for being awesome betas!)  
**


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